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

[Chris Bell]

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.

-- 
Chris Bell



-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug