Carsten, I don't know if this will be any help but maybe my situation will shed some light. I have 3 PL2500 Pentium Pros and 1 PL2500 PII 333mhz. My PII had always been a problem with kernel panics trying to install almost any distribution of Linux. The only thing that would install was a bare install of RedHat 6.1. Last night I finally got my hands on a replacement processor but when I went to change it I noticed that the switch settings on the system board were not set for a 333 MHz even though the system was seeing 333. I change the switches to what the documentation said was supposed to be 333 and now the system sees 210 MHz but no more problems. I don't know if there was a flaw in the PII processor boards for the PL2500s or what.
Just my .02 Neil -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Carsten P. Gehrke Sent: Monday, July 01, 2002 12:54 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [tomsrtbt] need some background information Hi, This is a question that Tom would probably be in the best position to answer, but if anyone else has any input, I'd appreciate that too. I have a Compaq ProLiant 2500R which I recently upgraded from dual Pentium Pros to dual Pentium II processors. After the upgrade, my Linux installation will no longer work; the kernel panics because it cannot mount the root file system. The details of my system are: Adaptec AHA-2940 controller with a 4.3 GB drive. This is the boot drive, and also the /tmp partition. Compaq embedded SCSI controller (NCR53C875) with one 4.3 GB and four 9.1 GB hot-plug SCSI drives. The 4.3 drive is home to /, /usr, /var, and /usr/src. Compaq SMART-2/P RAID controller with no drives attached yet. 1 GB RAM So why am I writing to this list? Well, I have used Tom's disk to boot this system in the past, so I naturally thought that I'd give it a try when I had problems. I got the latest version (2.0.103), and it boots fine, but will not recognize the embedded Compaq controller, so I have no access to /, /usr, etc. I can access all partitions on the 4.3 GB drive attached to the Adaptec controller. After some searching, I found an older version of Tom's disk (1.7.361), and tried it. The old version has no problems with any of the controllers, I can mount every partition, chroot, and try to rebuild my kernel. But that is the main problem. Regardless of the options I choose, I cannot get the kernel to work with the controllers correctly. The AIC-7xxx driver has problems; it tries to probe every device ID, but fails (even on the one drive that does exist). The ncr53c875 (or sym53c875) driver does not complain, but I still get a kernel panic indicating that it can't mount the root fs on 08:11 (which would be the correct major and minor numbers for the root partition). I have also tried to use the normal I/O option instead of memory-mapped I/O when building the kernel, but no luck. So Tom, do you have any idea what might have changed between version 1.7.361 and 2.0.103? The kernel I am using is 2.4.16. I am not using any distribution, but have compiled all programs on this system from the sources. It used to work just fine before I switched to the dual Pentium-II board. Since I can work with the system using the 1.7.361 version of tomsrtbt, I know that the hardware is supported by Linux in some way. I just need help finding out what I must do to get the kernel to recognize the SCSI controllers correctly. TIA, Carsten ======================================================================== Carsten P. Gehrke mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ========================================================================
