Bug#2300: unable to reboot
Hardware configuration: Pentium 100 MHz, 32 Mb RAM
1 IDE disk
NE2000 compatible network card
Debian version: Boot, root, and base-[1-3] disks from
debian/ALPHA_TEST/disks as of last week.
Debian packages were obtained from the debian/ALPHA_TEST/binary
directory last week but were updated with new files from
debian/unstable/binary/base on Wednesday.
I mentioned in an earlier note that dselect dies if libc5 is not
installed. Also, dselect has problems with installing from a mounted
file system. Workarounds to both of these problems are now known.
The current symptom is that a reboot results in a series of error
messages of the (approximate) form
child process number xxxx failed with error code ff00
immediately after loading the kernel and identifying devices.
The numbers xxxx are consecutive. They go by so quickly that I can't
see where they start but I think it is a very low number.
It seems that the problem is a conflict between new files in
unstable/binary/base and the kernel on those installation disks.
I tried several installations to try to narrow it down. Here was the
sequence.
1) Boot from distribution disks, install system.
q from dselect without installing anything.
Check by rebooting. OK.
2) Log in as root.
Install base/ld.so-1.7.14-1.deb using dpkg -i.
Install devel/libc5-5.2.18-1.deb using dpkg -i.
Install base/dpkg-1.0.15 using dpkg -i.
Reboot. Still ok.
3) Log in as root. Run deselect. Unselect all. Select required
packages in base. Install. Remove deselected packages. Noticed this
removed netbase and netstd. Reinstalled them. Reboot using boot
floppy created during installation. Got the errors indicated
above.
Repeat steps 1 and 2 without the reboots. Moved the base subdirectory
away from my binary directory and repeated step 3 installing the
Installed all the required packages except for those in base. This
time a reboot worked. Here is the list of packages I installed from
binary/base when the reboot failed
adduser-1.94-3.deb
ae-493-10.deb
base-0.93.6-13.deb
bash-1.14.4-3.deb
bsdutils-2.0-1.deb
chfn-1.0-5.deb
diff-2.7-9.deb
dpkg-1.0.15.deb
e2fsprogs-1.01-3.deb
ed-0.2-10.deb
fdflush-1.0.0-1.deb
fileutils-3.12-3.deb
findutils-4.1-5.deb
gawk-2.15.6-2.deb
grep-2.0-4.deb
gzip-1.2.4-8.deb
hostname-1.9-0.deb
image-1.2.13-7.deb
kbd-0.90-4.deb
last-5-13.deb
ld.so-1.7.14-1.deb
mbr-1.0.0-2.deb
miscutils-1.3-7.deb
modules-1.2.8-3.deb
mount-2.5-4.deb
ncurses-base-1.9.8a-4.deb
ncurses-bin-1.9.8a-4.deb
ncurses3.0-1.9.8a-4.deb
procps-0.98-0.deb
sed-2.05-5.deb
setserial-2.10-7.deb
sh-utils-1.12-4.deb
sysklogd-1.2-16.deb
syslinux-1.20-0.deb
sysvinit-2.58-2.deb
tar-1.11.8-3.deb
textutils-1.11-3.deb
timezone-7.46-0.deb
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