Hello Everyone:
The Story:
About two months ago I installed a third EIDE hard drive (WD 102AA 10.2
gig) on my box. The install itself wasn't a problem, it was recognized
and formatted easily. I divided the drive into four primary partitions.
Soon I discovered a problem booting between Win95B and RH 6.2. RH 6.2
was installed on the first primary partition and the swap file was put
in the second partition, the third partition was formatted ext2 for the
purpose of storing non-RH 6.2 programs and data to help avoid file
corruption, and the fourth partition was formatted vfat32 for saving
downloads from the web and installing progs I wanted to test to avoid
Win95B corruption.
The RH 6.2 install went flawlessly and everything except the servers
(ftp server, lan server, etc.) was installed without a hitch. Booting to
Win95B is the default and booting RH 6.2 is accomplished with a boot
floppy. After booting Win95B and formatting the fourth partition and
testing to verify accessibility and dependability I rebooted RH and
found it wasn't there!!!
I rebooted Win95B and checked the WD support services. I d/led a diag
and checked the drive finding the ATA/66 option was turned off and
turned it on. That seemed to fix the problem. RH booted fine. At that
point I started using the drive in both OSes. RH worked great and Win95B
had plenty of extra space. Like I said before, that was a few months
ago. Now suddenly, RH won't boot!!!
The boot process hangs immediately after the kernel is read from the
boot floppy.
Nothing was done to alter the RH install, it
is used as a client box to surf the net, learn gnome, gimp, play games
installed by the RH install, and just learn more about Linux in general.
None of the config files have been changed since the original install
and setup a few months ago. Originally two boot disks were made. Booting
with either disk acts exactly the same so I can rule out boot disk
corruption.
It seems to me that Win95B will occasionally write an id to the root
partition of the drive even though it only has access to the fourth
partition and that id corrupts the RH boot. How can this be avoided? The
problem only occurs when booting RH after working in Win95B. Once RH
boots, the box can be started in RH any number of times without problem.
No degrading of the RH boot was noticed since the original ATA/66
problem. This problem just happened, no hardware/software settings were
changed for Win95B or RH. Also, I have checked but didn't find any
viruses.
The actual error messages:
Warning: Unable to open an initial Console.
Kernel Panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.
The Specs:
486DX50 VLB
QD6580 VLV EIDE controller, i/o interface
hda Maxtor 1 gig
hdb WD 340 meg
hdc WD 10.2 gig
hdd NEC 40x CD
The motherboard setup only accommodates two IDE devices on port 0 irq
14, however, the controller allows two EIDE devices on port 0 irq 14 and
allows two EIDE devices on port 1 irq 15 and has its own bios which is
enabled. Ports 0 and 1 has been used for a few years without a problem
until the WD 10.2 gig and RH 6.2 was installed.
I know I need and want to get a new box but that is financially
impossible at this time. Actually, I eventually intend to build a new
box and use the WD 10.2 gig in it as hda and use the 486DX50 VLB as a
firewall.
Thank you.
_______________________________________________
Redhat-list mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
