[sclug] Debian Sarge won't use a disk

[Dr Adam J Trickett]

Hi,

I'm building a machine out of scrap, and I've hit a strange error,
what ever "Partition check" is, during the boot sequence, it locks
the machine up with a 2.4 or 2.6 kernel from Debian 3.1, so much
so that it won't even install.

Debian 3.0 "Woody" installed okay with a 2.2.20 kernel, and I've
been able to apt-get dist-upgrade the machine to 3.1, and
everything is okay, but the 3.1 kernels 2.4 and 2.6 won't run.

Everything is okay until they do a Partition check and then they
freeze on the second drive "hdb".

The machine is quite antique, it's a P133 CPU, PIO disk
controllers, and the second drive is only ~500Mb.

I'm guessing that in the older kernel it's not doing something
fancy, but the newer ones are, and the antique drive doesn't
support the feature and locks up.

Any suggestions? or tips of where to start looking?

I've already tried ide=nodma on 2.4 and 2.6 and while it disabled
DMA, it still failed on the Partition check. I even manually entered
the disk geometry, and that didn't help. With a 2.4 kernel is stops
with hdb unmounted, and with 2.6 it halts.

I've also got the initrd in place, and GRUB is pointing to it, in
the menu.lst.

Any ideas....?

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Adam Trickett
Overton, HANTS, UK

I guess that, if you're in Microsoft's shoes, it makes sense. If you
can't write software or protocols that can stably walk and chew gum,
program in a limit that prevents the user from telling it to do so.
   -- Jonathan Patschke, on limitations in Active Directory