Hi all
All is now fixed and I can detail the problem.
When I installed again last night I selected a minimal install and it installed OK,
this time GRUB was able to write to the MBR. The install CD ejected and it rebooted
into linux. Command line only - all OK.
I did an update/upgrade and installed Gnome Env. Gnome didn't pull in xserver-xorg so
that needed to be added on. Then X needed some fonts (fixed, misc) that it didn't
have - why didn't xfonts etc get pulled in as a dependency? Anyhow Gnome then came up
and I had a nice GUI. Rebooted and I got:
RAMDISK: ran out of memory.
VFS: Can't mount root etc....
kernel panic.
This occurred every time. Googling indicated that this can occur if the ramdisk is
too small or the initrd image is corrupt. Looing in /boot I found initrd-2.6.17-2-686
(~ 1.1MB) and initrd-2.6.17-2-686.dpkg-bak (~ 4MB). What had occurred was that during
the upgrade a newer kernel was installed or initrd was replaced and there wasn't
enough space in /boot to fit both initrd files. Hence the truncated initrd-2/6.17-2-686.
I removed the initrd-2.6.17-2-686 and renamed initrd-2.6.17-2-686.dpkg-bak to
initrd-2.6.17-2-686 and rebooted. Bingo! Loaded fine.
The /boot is limited to 8M as the motherboard for this older Athlon can only boot
from a partition of a few cylinders. The 8M is the maximum size that it can be which
may be a trap for us in the future whenever the kernel is upgraded.
Thanks all for your suggestions.
Mike
Michael Lake wrote:
Thanks. Tried the above. I didn't want to touch the original partitions
so used manual partitioning. I have /boot /tmp /var and / on separtate
partitions. All seemed to go OK till grub tried to install into the MBR.
It "failed to write to target" and when trying to boot I get
0101010101's to the boot screen.
I'll try tonight again. It's an older machine and /boot is on a separate
partition as the motherboard won't boot of large disks.
--
Michael Lake
Computational Research Support Unit
Science Faculty, UTS
Ph: 9514 2238
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