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

[Martin Norman Stevens]

On Fri, May 09, 2003 at 05:27:55PM +0000, Chris Bell wrote:
> On Fri 09 May, John Edwards wrote:
> > 
> > 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).
> > 
> > 
>    You do not mention the capacity of the hard discs, but you may find that
> the BIOS does not recognise them. That would explain why the on-board IDE
> controllers do not appear to work. Initial booting is done under BIOS
> control, and it is programmed to boot from the first disc. The way round
> this is to place a small boot partition, about 5-10MB is normal, at the
> beginning of the disc. You need to install the swap and / partitions first,
> followed by the /boot partition.
>    In some cases I have found even that does not work, the disc is
> incorrectly recognised, and not all of the disc can be used. In that case I
> have found that I can tell the BIOS that there is no disc present and let
> Linux find it for itself. The full disc is then formatted correctly.


I had a similar problem with a pci ata133 card and a 120gb hard drive, I
ended up using the sarge business card install iso. It's not very
polished, and I had to mess around with some network modules but I did
get debian installed on to this box in the end. 

The bf2.4 or any other woody install just wouldn't work.

HTH

Budgester


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