[H-GEN] Debian install floppy boot problem

[Greg Black]

I have made some progress, but I still can't get it to really
boot...

On 2003-04-22, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 22, 2003 at 02:38:14PM +1000, Greg Black wrote:
> > serial console install option, I'd have been able to escape from
> > the attempt to drive the screen which turned it into so much
> > useless real estate.
> 
> Appending 'vga=0' should work, I think. Alternatively 'video=vc:8' should.
> (The former changes to 80x25 mode, the latter disables the frame buffer)

That was interesting.  The 'vga=0' didn't help at all; the
'video=vc:8' sort of helped a bit, but not enough; but I found a
suggestion in the floppy's help which then made more sense to me
and tried 'video=vga16:off' and that got me through the install
with a legible screen.

I restored the FreeBSD MBR boot selector thingy since it does
remember which system it last booted and installed LILO in the
root partition's boot sector of /dev/hda1.  I wasn't offered any
other loaders (e.g., grub).  And I did the install without a
swap partition because there's no spare space for it and I don't
need it at this stage.

I tried "vanilla", "compact", "idepci", "safe" and "bf2.4"; of
those, only the "bf2.4" ever got to the end of the install.
Most of them didn't even get far enough through the floppy boot
to interact with me before they hung.  So I concentrated on the
"bf2.4" thing, as it seemed most promising.

I found I had to do the 'video=vga16:off' when booting from the
hard disk if I wanted to be able to read the screen and see why
it had stopped booting.  Surprisingly, although it did boot fine
from the floppy for the install, the resultant image that ended
up on the hard disk seems not to be kosher.

It does a lot of normal stuff, gets to setting the system clock
and then prints the following lines (typed by hand):

  Calculating module dependencies... done.
  loading modules: usb-ohci usb.c: registered new driver usbdevfs
  usb.c: registered new driver hub
  PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 00:01.2
  PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 00:01.3
  usb-ohci.c: USB OHCI at membase 0xd002f000, IRQ 10
  usb-ohci.c: usb-00:01.2, Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 7001
  usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1

And then it hangs.

Now I'm wondering if we can tell it somehow to skip that USB
stuff.  For my purposes at the moment, I don't need USB and I'd
be happy to lose it if we can get the thing to actually run.

Any ideas?

Cheers, Greg

-- 
Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> <http://www.gbch.net/gjb.html>
GPG signed mail preferred; further information in headers.
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