Apologies in advance for the length of this post. Those who don't have a hearty appetite for sharing other's problems should bail out now :-(.
A few weeks back, I bugged you all for the first time, while preparing for where I am now. Back then, I was trying to install a debian sid 2.6.4 kernel on an old Dell Inspiron 7000. That was a "test run" in preparation for buying a new laptop. I was quite stuck, having never installed anything other than Xandros (and Windows :-), which installs correctly on nearly every machine imaginable! Anyway, a number of you kind folks were able to help me over the hump, and I have that laptop running nicely now (even upgraded it to a 2.6.5 kernel the other day, downloaded from kernels.org). Last week I purchased a high-end Sager NP8890. 2 60GB 7200RPM drives, 2GB ram, 3.4ghz P4, 800mhz front-side bus, 16" 1600x1200 screen with 128MB DDR, etc. I was going to do _exactly_ what I did on the Dell to get it running, which was: 1) Boot from LindowsOS Live CD 2) use "debootstrap" to create a "chroot" environment on the hard disk 3) chroot to there, and use apt-get, etc., to install a kernel, etc. 4) Boot from the new drive. Machine showed up early on Monday. Since I still don't have things working, you should only know how much grief I have gone through trying hundreds of things over the past 4 days, and googling my brains out, before coming hat in hand (once again) to this list... Please pity me :-) OK, so I booted off of the Lindows CD. Unfortunately, while output from dmesg shows that it recognized the two drives (sort of), they weren't available in /dev/ to be mounted, fdisk'ed, etc. They were invisible to Lindows, even though the hardware probe showed that they were there. They showed up as "hde" and "hdg". It turns out that this machine has a RAID capable controller (though I purposely configured the machine at purchase to have _no raid_, and that was correctly done). The controller is a Promise Ultra100 DMA. I'm such a novice at this stuff that I am not sure if there was anything that I could have done at that point to "enable" Lindows to see the drive(s), but I quickly gave up and decided to do what I had hoped to avoid doing, which was to "install directly to the disk", and then "upgrade". So, I popped in my Xandros Desktop 2.0 CD, and (thankfully!) it recognized the drives and installed correctly. In fact, everything "just worked", including sound, running X at 1600x1200, both drives, internet (the chip is Gigabit capable :-). I was able to configure a PCMCIA wireless card correctly as well. So, you say I should be happy. Unfortunately, my original goal was to put "sid" with a 2.6.4 kernel on the machine, not to run XD. I thought I was home free, figuring that I could run "debootstrap" on the second drive, chroot to it, install it there, and worst case be able to "dd" it back to the first drive! debootstrap got reasonably far along each time, and then always failed in one of two ways: 1) After checking, validating and extracting _all_ of the packages apparently successfully, it would complain that the "ln" command failed because "/bin/awk" already existed. I checked, and sure enough, there was a link from awk->mawk. I removed the link, and then it complained that libc6 wasn't installed (or wasn't a "high enough" version), and nothing that I did would change that. I knew from earlier experiments (that I am sparing you!) that if I started mucking too much on the XD disk, I'd get it to a point of instability and have to reinstall (yes, I had to install XD at least 3 or 4 times over the past few days, and now I can only work in single user mode...). Suffice it to say that debootstrap just ended up "not being worth the effort"... 2) I (foolishly) thought that perhaps now that there was a valid Linux distro (a close cousin of Lindows!) on the disk, that Lindows Live would recognize the disk. So, I booted from it again, but unfortunately, it was wishful thinking as the drives were still invisible, even though the hde and hdg lines were in dmesg. 3) I then decided to see if I could build a newer kernel, boot from it, and then dist-upgrade to sid, etc. No matter what I did, I couldn't get the "initrd" image to work. After much hair pulling, it turns out that XD has a custom mkinitrd in their own package, which doesn't take the standard args, and so I had to start the dance of slowly sucking in upgraded packages. Same turned out to be true for lilo. So, at some point, I had a "Frankenstein" system with parts XD and parts sid. Never got the new kernel to boot though... 4) Next bright idea was to build a new kernel on the Dell with make-kpkg, and install the package on the Sager. Toward that end, I downloaded and built a 2.6.5 kernel from kernels.org, and it had the Promise drivers in menuconfig. Unfortunately, the Dell is slow, and it took 3 hours 20 minutes to build the kernel. Luckily, it built correctly. I first installed it on the Dell, which is now happily running 2.6.5 :-). Bringing the package over to the Sager and installing it yielded no joy. It seemed that the initrd was the problem again, even though the identical initrd worked on the Dell. So, the Sager obviously needed something in the kernel or the initrd image that the Dell didn't. 5) I decided to "go for broke", break the XD install (hence the ability only to use single user console mode now), and do a dist-upgrade to sid, so that I could build the kernel more reliably on the Sager. On one level alone it was a good move. The same build that took 3.33 hours on the Dell takes about 40 minutes on the Sager :-). I have built the kernel at least 5 times, each time shoving more things directly into the kernel away from modules (trying to get away from initrd dependencies). OK, all of the above was background (that I condensed hugely from 4 days of pain...), to let you know how close I am, but still no cigar! When it boots now, I can see everything being probed and apparently coming up correctly as well. The drives both get recognized with exactly the same bios and port numbers that XD sees them as, and I see messages that an EXT3 filesystem journal is in a correct state (or something like that), and one for ReiserFS as well (the first disk is ext3 and the second reiser). XD defaults to Reiser, but on a subsequent install I switched the primary drive to ext3 in case reiser was causing my updated kernel problems (which it apparently wasn't). The last two messages are that RAMDISK installed the CramFS correctly (and I see a "done." message unpacking XXXX blocks), then the following error message: Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on hde2 Yes, hde2 is the correct root, and that's what XD correctly boots from. I tried a variety of "root=" parameters in lilo, including the full "/dev/ide/host2/bus0/target0/lun0/part2". Nothing works. After much googling, I settled on the logical conclusion that the initrd image doesn't have the correct drivers to read the hard drive. It's strange, because the kernel clearly can, seeing the journals on both drives in both ext3 and reiserfs formats. my mkinitrd command is: mkinitrd -o initrd.img-2.6.5 /lib/modules/2.6.5/ The conf files has "MODULES=most", and the initrd image is over 3 megs, so their in there (I think :-), but I'm confused anyway, since the kernel itself has them all statically linked in. I also name ext3 reiser and jbd (just because XD had it in their initrd) in the /etc/mkinitrd/modules file, though like I said, I think they are statically linked in... I feel like I'm tantalizingly close, but also miles away. As I type this, I'm downloading a Knoppix 3.3 iso image (which was suggested the last time by at least one person on the list), to see if I can boot that live and have the drive recognized. Part of the problem (in my simpleton opinion) is that XD is such a customized distro (a very nice one at that!), that once I mix and match, all bets are off. If I could do all of this off of a Live CD, then I can create a pristine distribution on the drive itself (like debootstrap). One of the big problems is that I can't do a line-by-line comparison of the XD dmesg output and the bad 2.6.5 dmesg output, because after the kernel panic, the machine has to be hard-power-cycled, and of course, I can only see 25 lines of output on the screen. Like I said previously, most of the messages that scroll by seem 100% correct, and I can see the one that fails... P.S. I saw people with the same error message on the kernel panic get responses like add a "mem=XXXM" to the boot line. I did, and it didn't help. At this point, I'm a little at my wits end. I would _hate_ to "give in" and just keep this as an XD machine. I am truly impressed by XD, and for many people, it's likely a perfect fit. I like to play with new things, which often don't work on XD because they are an older release with a very custom kernel, and they are oriented towards businesses, so stability is more important than innovation. I can't easily sync my treo 600 to XD, but it works out of the box with 2.6.4 sid. That's but one of many examples :-) Any pointers will be greatly appreciated, even just a "wow, I feel your pain" :-). I would be delighted to post my ".config" file, and anything else that I can get my hands on (other than the dmesg output, unless anyone has any bright suggestions), but I thought that might be overkill given the sheer length of this post... Thanks in advance!
