While booting my newly installed woody system (Why not sarge? It's a long story which will be told another time) the kernel crashes, recovers, and fails to make one of my hard disk accessible.
Here's the relevant part of the dmesg output: ... ... Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31 ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx PIIX: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 38 PIIX: chipset revision 2 PIIX: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later PIIX: neither IDE port enabled (BIOS) PIIX: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 39 PIIX: chipset revision 2 PIIX: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later ide0: BM-DMA at 0x3000-0x3007, BIOS settings: hda:pio, hdb:pio ide1: BM-DMA at 0x3008-0x300f, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:pio hda: FUJITSU MPB3064ATU, ATA DISK drive hdb: Mxo 89H , ATA DISK drive hdd: HL-DT-ST CD-ROM GCR-8520B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 hda: 12672450 sectors (6488 MB), CHS=13410/15/63 hdb: 264241407 sectors (135292 MB) w/2111KiB Cache, CHS=16383/127/127 hdb: INVALID GEOMETRY: 127 PHYSICAL HEADS? Partition check: /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: [PTBL] [788/255/63] p1 p2 p3 p4 < p5 p6 p7 p8 p9 p10 > Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000028 printing eip: c382f3c1 *pde = 00000000 Oops: 0000 CPU: 0 EIP: 0010:[<c382f3c1>] Not tainted EFLAGS: 00010212 eax: 00000000 ebx: 000003f0 ecx: 00000300 edx: 00000045 esi: c384b144 edi: 00000040 ebp: 00000040 esp: c2c49ee8 ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018 Process modprobe (pid: 28, stackpage=c2c49000) Stack: c384b144 00000001 c384afe0 00000001 c384b210 03002980 c382f458 00000340 00000000 00000002 c3852980 000019e0 c3831fc5 c38524d9 c38529c0 c3851000 00000001 00000001 c01156fd c2c48000 400199d8 bfffc4dc bfffc49c 00001800 Call Trace: [<c384b144>] [<c384afe0>] [<c384b210>] [<c382f458>] [<c3852980>] [<c3831fc5>] [<c38524d9>] [<c38529c0>] [<c01156fd>] [<c3851060>] [<c0106d93>] Code: 83 78 28 00 74 09 56 8b 40 28 ff d0 83 c4 04 80 a6 9e 00 00 <3>ext3: No journal on filesystem on ide0(3,2) Adding Swap: 128516k swap-space (priority -1) Real Time Clock Driver v1.10e ... ... By the way, I'm also wondering about the weird characters in the line that identifies my second hard disk, an 80G Maxtor, but I don't think they do any harm in themselves. hdb: Mxo 89H , ATA DISK drive -- hendrik