Re: boot disk question/suggestion
Ossama Othman wrote:
>The machines both have two Adaptec 7890 and one Adaptec 7860 SCSI chipsets
>installed. Each machine also has a gigabyte of memory and four Intel
>Pentium II Xeons installed. In order to get RedHat to work we had to fool
>the kernel into thinking that it had less than a gig of memory since it
>can't seem to handle more then about 1020MB (confirmation anyone?) of
>memory.
2.0.x maxes out at 2^30-2^26 = 1006632960 bytes, or 960MB, of RAM.
Thus, you'll wanna use "mem=960M".
You can also adjust some headers (I forget which) to expand the kernel
memory / virtual memory split (it is adjustable, and it defaults to 1GB/3GB).
>Second we also had to tell the kernel to prevent the aic7xxx
>driver from probing since it causes the system to crash if it does probe.
>Here is the boot line:
>
> boot: linux mem=1000M aic7xxx=no_probe
>
>The RedHat boot disk does no probing at all since SCSI drivers appear to
>be loaded during the installation process, not during the boot process.
>OTOH, Debian's kernel loads several SCSI drivers (right?) which appears to
>be causing my system to crash. The system crashes right after the IDE
>detection boot step.
>
>Is it possible to shut off all SCSI support at the "boot:" prompt? If
>not, can anyone suggest a solution? Since RedHat's boot technique appears
>to work well in situations like mine (new hardware, probing causes
>crashes), can we or should we do something similar?
>
>Are there any new boot disks available besides the ones that were released
>last on 12/29? I can't make my own boot disks since I currently don't
>have access to Debian system and I don't want to use master or va to
>create boot disk images.
You can switch out the kernel on the rescue disk on any linux system fairly
easily:
# dd if=resc1440.bin of=/dev/fd0
# mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt
# cd /mnt
# rm linux
# cp /place/i/have/my/working/kernel linux
# ./rdev.sh
# cd /
# umount /mnt
Yes, the rdev.sh script does require that you mount the disk on /mnt.
Make sure your rescue disk contains ext2, msdos, ramdisk, initrd, and ELF
support.
Happy booting.
--
Robert Woodcock - rcw@debian.org
"It's like a love-hate relationship, but without the love." -- jwz, on linux
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