Rod Butcher wrote:
Thru lots of experimenting I've discovered a few things :-
1. The messages I wanted to stop scrolling were apparently produced by initrd.img... nothing seems to stop them scrolling. I just removed initrd.img from Grub and booted directly into the kernel. I then discovered the real problem was ocurring when the kernel tried to access fstab.
You will not be able to boot your kernel without 'kernel panic' resulting in
frozen 'everything' it you remove 'initrd.img'. If you are able to reboot, you
must have booted from some other installed kernel other than from what you
have intended. The 'initrd.img' is the 'mother-of-all-modules' that allows,
amongst others, mounting of file systems. So, I'm wondering how you
are able to boot.
2. Kernels 2.6.8 upwards seem to default to a new SCSI driver for SATA disks... it can't seem top read the fstab created by older versions i.e. with names hda, hda1 etc.
/etc/fstab from 2.4.x is understood by 2.6.x provided you did not re-arrange the cabling of your drives. For example, your IDE drives that used to be /dev/hda1, hda2, hdb1, hdb2, etc. should identify exactly the same if you you did not change the cabling. Your IDE drives becomes /dev/sda1, etc. for example if you connect it through USB via some device housing.
3. Compiling kernels 2.6.8 and up with the (now apparently deprecated) BLK_DEV_IDE_SATA (i.e. not using libata) gets me past this problem and performance on IDE and SATA disk reads using the "old" IDE interface is no worse than with 2.6.7.
Upgrading from one 2.6.x to 2.6.x kernel to recognise the same device is not
affected. So, something else you did like re-arranging the physical connection
changed things.
4. Question :- do people need to change all SATA entries from HDA etc. to SDA to use the new libata ?
I'd be really greatful if somebody with 2.6.8 or 9 could send me a copy of their fstab file, and tell me whether it was installed fresh or as an upgrade from 2.6.7.
Again, you don't if you did not re-arrange the physical connections.
Thanks Rod
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Peter Hardy wrote:
On Sun, 2004-10-31 at 14:15, Rod Butcher wrote:
Sluggers, can you tell me how I can step thru the messages when I boot up.. i.e. thru Lilo and then the initial kernel startup...
- You should be able to hit scroll lock during bootup to... well... stop scrolling. - As mentioned by others, dmesg will show you the contents of the kernel's ring buffer. Just after bootup this should show you the booting messages. It can rapidly overflow with things like firewall log messages though. - Some distributions (well, the only one I know for sure is debian and its offspring) put a copy of the dmesg output in /var/log/dmesg very early on in init's boot process.
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