I solved the boot problem while I was documenting it. I am sending the solution, because it was so difficult to arive at. I think this almost might be called a bug/design flaw in the bootprompt. I also have some other questions, which I list at the end of the email.
System: Dell Precision 410 dm 2 450 Megahurtz Pentium 3 Processors 1024 Meg ECC SDRAM 2 IDE HardDrives: Desheta 34 GXP -- IBM 16383 Cyl 16 Head 63 Sectors 1 IDE Samsung SC-140C CD-Rom 2 Adaptec Scsi Cards (7880 & 7890) 1 Seagate Tapedrive (attached to a Scsi Card) NIC -- 3com 3C917 Software: Debian 2.1 (From an official disk from Linux Press) Description of Partitions: on dev/hda I have a 2 gig vfat partitions. It is followed by ~26gig of unused space. on dev/hdb I have a 2 gig vfat partitions followed by 3 gig of unused space, followed by ~23 gig NTFS partition. Problem: I get a Kernel panic when I boot from the Debian installation CD-Rom. The excact out put is: [MS-DOS FS Rel. 12, FAT 0, check=n,conv=b,uid=0,gid=0,umask=022,bmap] [me=0x0,ds=0,#f=0,fs=0,fl=0,ds=0,de=0,data=0,se=0,ts=0,ls=0,rc=0,fc=4294967265] Transaction block size = 512 Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 01:00 If I am reading this correctly, the cdrom is trying to mount a Ram disk (major#=1, minor=0 corresponds to a Ram disk) http://www.xteamlinux.com.cn/lxr/source/Documentation/devices.txt list the codes. In going through the linux bootprompt howto (section 3.3) I saw that there were some problems with the bios correctly communicating the amount of available memory back to Linux. If I type: linux mem=1024M the system will sometimes boot. (I think everybody would agree that nonreproducable behaviour is symtomatic of a bug). This commands seems to get me to boot more often: linux mem=512M I am interested in any input anybody else might have about this problem. My system is pretty high-end, so I am running in a very different environment than where Linux was developed. Do I need to tell Linux that I have two processors? When I finish installing linux, do I need to tell it how much memory I have? As a rule of thumb, I have always tried to have memory swap files with a total space of twice my RAM. Should I follow that rule of thumb here? How big should my swap files be? Do I need to specify any special parameters for my SCSI cards? Do I need any special drivers for my tape drive? Now that I have gotten the machine to boot, more than once, I am going to wait to hear from people before I proceed. Thanks in Advance, Clark Sims --== Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ ==-- Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
