[H-GEN] Debian install floppy boot problem

[Greg Black]

On 2003-04-23, Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
> Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> writes:
> 
> 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.

I can't find that file in the stuff I have; but in any case I
think I'll try other things first -- perhaps some Debian gurus
will be at the meeting tomorrow and can better interpret what
appears on the screen.

> > 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 haven't tried that (yet), but I might try it in the next
reboot cycle.

> 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.

Tricky at the moment, as I can't find the sources anywhere.  The
CD has a directory /cdrom/dists/woody/main/source which contains
the following directories: admin base comm devel doc editors
electronics games graphics hamradio interpreters libs mail math
misc net news oldlibs otherosfs science shells sound tex text
utils web x11 -- but they are all empty.

> 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.

OK, I extracted a file called "linux.bin" from the floppy I
booted from during the install using mtools; and I built my
FreeBSD kernel with ext2fs support and extracted a file of the
same size called /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-bf2.4 from the installed
partition.  They differ in two bytes in the first block, so I
suspect that they are pretty similar.  Here's the cmp output:

    $ cmp -l linux.bin /mnt/linux/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-bf2.4           
       506 300   0
       510   1   0

> > 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.

I'm not ready to damn Linux yet, although this is proving harder
than I expected.

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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