[H-GEN] Debian install floppy boot problem

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

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Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> writes:

> 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.

One thought I have is that you may well be better off using a serial
console until you can compile your own kernel on the thing.  The file
Documentation/serial-console.txt (part of the kernel sources) will
tell you all you need to know about doing this.  Then at least you'll
be able to make screen dumps of when the kernel fails, etc, and it may
even help the machine be a little more stable.

> 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.

I looked in Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt and didn't find
anything useful there (well I suppose you could disable the PCI
bus...).  Perhaps you could disable USB through the BIOS?  I'm not
even sure that'll work.

I think you may need to build your own kernel, by going through the
install process without rebooting and installing compilers, etc as
best you can.

Have you verified the kernel that gets installed on the disk is the
same as the one from the boot floppy?  I think it should be possible
to extract it by hand by mounting the disk as a MSDOS filesystem.

> Any ideas?

Fresh out.  If I hadn't been through these sorts of shenanigans with
other Unix OSes I'd be thinking there's something seriously wrong with
Linux, though.

jason, although the kernel does tend to let one down a bit
-- 
``I didn't program you for sarcasm.''

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