At 12:09 Uhr +0200 13.04.2001, Matthias Fruehauf wrote:

On Fri, Apr 13, Peter Hartmann wrote:

...

Hi,

I am new to SuSe and new to this list. I searched the backnumbers of this list for something relevant, but nothing showed up. I guess I need a bit of help now:

I am trying to install SuSe PPC 7.1 on my OLDWORLD Umax Apus 2000, via BootX, as it should be. Booting into Linux is successful, all my Hardware is detected by the kernel, so everything looks OK until Linuxrc comes into play. Somewhere (that is, it seems that there is no really exact point of time) before or after the first GUI dialog asking to choose between text-based or GUI based installation, the connection to the CD-Rom seems to get lost. Shortly later, I get an error message saying that an error had occured. If I try to move on installing - that is, if the system does not already hang at that point - YaST shows a message like "Trying to mount the CD-Rom", and when I am lucky, after several ages I get an error message that the operation failed, but mostly the message hangs there for several minutes/forever with no reading sound of the device. Reading sound of the device, however, can be heard well into Linuxrc's doing its hardware checking.

To be more specific, this is the relevant extract from the kernel messages:

Detected scsi CD-Rom sr0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 3, lun 0

So the built in Matsushita CD-Rom drive was clearly correctly detected. After detecting usb devices etc., at the very end of the messages I have (twice, that is)

VFS : Disk change detected on device sr(11,0) Device not ready. Make sure there is a disc in the drive. scsi disk I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0

HM, which kernel did you use? The default should be the 2.4.2. Try to use the 2.2.18 with the correspondending ramdisk. Does this help?

Thanks for your message! Nope, the default (for the basic installation) is 2.2.18. If I try the opposite: Where can I find kernel 2.4.2 and the corresponding ramdisk? How can I make it show up in BootX? What I am having on CD1/suseboot/ is BootX App BootX Settings Finder Mac OS Rom os-chooser.example ramdisk.image.deflt.gz ramdisk.image.gz ramdisk.image.tdfx.gz System tools vmlinux vmlinux-2.4 vmlinux-tdfx yaboot yaboot.conf * BootX Extension Since it is not at all clear from the manual what the appropriate ramdisk for the kernel "vmlinux" is, I chose "ramdisk.image.gz" (which is the default). "vmlinux" is the only kernel that shows up in BootX. And, BTW, although according to the manual, the default kernel arguments showing when BootX is launched should be root=/dev/fd0 ramdisk_size=64000 what shows up as the default but did not work is root=0200 ramdisk_size=128000 which I think is pretty odd and contradictory. I used the arguments form the book. Any suggestions? __ Peter Hartmann ________ mailto:hphartmann@justmail.de

At 14:29 Uhr +0200 13.04.2001, nicola moretti wrote:

Peter Hartmann wrote:

...

... Since it is not at all clear from the manual what the appropriate ramdisk for the kernel "vmlinux" is, I chose "ramdisk.image.gz" (which is the default). "vmlinux" is the only kernel that shows up in BootX. And, BTW, although according to the manual, the default kernel arguments showing when BootX is launched should be

root=/dev/fd0 ramdisk_size=64000

what shows up as the default but did not work is

root=0200 ramdisk_size=128000

which I think is pretty odd and contradictory. I used the arguments form the book.

Any suggestions?

Thanks for your suggestion!

I don't have suggestions for your problem with the CD, but for sure the default "root=/dev/fd0" is wrong (fd0 is floppy disk. God knows why I should have root device on floppy when installing from CD...:-). I have always had everything working right by stripping that string from the BootX dialog, but without touching anything else (no ramdisk increment, etc.).

Yes, this made me a bit suspicious also, but I figured that this may somehow be related to the ramdisk image. Anyway, I tried as you suggested, to no avail. The symptoms are exactly identical. I even tried deleting all kernel arguments, no change. I also tried: ramdisk_size=64000 root=0200 ramdisk_size=64000 This is just experimental computing, and the result was the same. After so and so many reboots, I am more and more sure that there is something non-deterministic about where the communication with the CD-Rom fails. Sometimes it fails somewhere still in LinusxRC, but once I could even get until 75% of YaST's system checking. The point of failure is reached between certain points of the boot process, but is otherwise rather erratic.

Just guessing, but if your computer have 128MB RAM or so, your setting for the ramdisk may leave no resources left for other needs...

Changing the ram_disk size to 128000 or 48000 explicitly dumps me into the kernel debugger, where the system freezes. ram_disk=64000 and not ram_disk argument at all both work, until things come to halt due to the CD-Problems. So, more suggestions are welcome ;-) Thanks, __ Peter Hartmann ________ mailto:hphartmann@justmail.de