Hello, Yes I am a newbie and I have what is probably a silly problem with the generic "all drivers loaded" kernel boot disk for Debian 1.1
I have an Adaptec 2742AT adapter (dual EISA SCSI, aic7770) and the boot disk finds this without trouble and registers the attached devices OK. Auto probing then continues until the NCR 53c406a driver reports back that no ports were found. The AIC 7770 driver reports at the same time a "spurious interrupt" and kernel panics. I have installed the Slakware 2.0.0 and RedHat Rembrant without this problem but because of the "everything including kitchen sink + basement" approach taken by the generic Debian boot disk I am unable to start the Debian 1.1 install process. To try and get around this, from a slakware install I created a new (Debian src) kernel and then "rdev -r" the new kernel and copy to the generic boot disk. Did not work so I then tried to create a new boot disk to work with the rest of the base installation set. No luck. That kernel boots OK, mounts all my existing volumes and gives me a logon prompt. I cannot seem to be able to generate a boot disk that then automaticaly loads the Root disk image into the RAM disk. Probably a LILO thing or "rdev" thing. Read the "bootdisk, FAQ's but can't seem to get it together. My conclusion from playing around with the Debian Kernel source is that it has to live in a Debian system to compile and get everything working properly. Cross implementing from Slakware has so far yielded poor results for me (a non programmer techo type). All of this because I can't get the generic disk to work. So what do I do now ? Question; Is there a way to turn off autoprobing and tell the generic boot disk what SCSI driver to load ? Suggestion to Bruce Perens; Would it not be such a bad idea to include a few "reduced / less complex" versions of the kernel boot disks ie Adaptec, NCR, Buslogic + EATA and Misc, SCSI + Net, SCSI + oddball CDROMS etc etc like is done with other distributions ? Once a system is base installed then we can flesh it out with packages. Thankyou for your consideration and time, Dave (newbie) Stirrup Sydney, Australia.
