[Gllug] Debian not booting on extra IDE card (/dev/hde)

[John Edwards]

Hi

I have two old Dell machines on which I have installed Debian, but neither 
can boot the standard Debian kernels which an use initrd (eg 2.4.18-386). 
They work fine booting from the same hard disk with the boot floppy kernels 
(2.4.20-bf2.4 and 2.4.18-bf2.4) which do not use an initrd.

The hard disks are the master drives on the first channel on an PCI IDE 
card (CMD 680 chipset) and so are /dev/hde (the two old Dell machines have 
onboard Intel IDE controllers that are not good and can not be disabled).

Lilo is setup to use /dev/hde3 as the root (hde1 being boot and hde2 being 
swap), and has the hde drive mapped as BIOS drive 80h. The initrd images 
have been created using the default Debian options, and I've also tried 
explicitly giving it the root fs instead of autoprobing.


The symptoms are that the boot floppy kernels detect the Intel and CMD 680 
IDE controllers, then the hard disk, then mount the root fs and work fine.

The standard Debian kernels only detect the Intel IDE controller and then 
try to mount the root fs. This produces the following error:
    mount: /dev2/root is not a valid block device

And so without a root fs init can't continue and the kernel panics.


Both the boot floppy and standard Debian kernels have the CMD640/680 driver 
in the kernel, so how do I get a kernel to know the card is there ? 


-- 
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|       John Edwards    Email: John.Edwards at uk.com       |
|                                                        |
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