RH-9 boot hangs from floppy bootdisk

RH-9 boot hangs from floppy bootdisk

[Shash Chatterjee]

Hi,

I have just installed RH-9 from ISO images I downloaded yesterday.
This system used to run RH-7.3 until this morning. The RH install CD ran 
and installed just fine, and I created a boot disk on floppy.  I 
installed GRUB on the first partition of my RH drive, but not on the MBR.

I have 2 hard-drives, with Win-XP Pro on the first one (C:, /dev/hda) 
and RH (D:, /dev/hdb) on the second.  I also have a DVD-ROM (E:, 
/dev/hdc) and a CD-RW drive (F: /dev/hdd).

When booting from floppy, it loads the kernel/ramdisk from floppy, then 
recognizes the HW and then hangs with the following message (at the 
bottom).  Hitting any key causes a single "keyboard: unknown keysequence 
0e .." and then I have to hard-reset to recover.

Any help would be most appreciated.  Here's the console output:
.....
PIIX4: IDE controller at PCI slot 00:07.1
PIIX4: chipset revision 1
PIIX4: not 100% native mode, will probe irqs later
	ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007, BIOS settings: hda:dma, hdb:dma
	ide1: BM-DMA at oxf008-0xf00f, BIOS settings: hdc:dma, hdd:dma
HPT370: IDE controller at PCI slot 00:0e.1
HPT370: chipset revision 3
HPT370: not 100% native mode, will probe irqs later
	ide2: BM-DMA at 0xb400-0xb407, BIOS settings: hde:pio, hdf:pio
	ide3: BM-DMA at oxb408-0xb40f, BIOS settings: hdg:pio, hdh:pio
hda: IC35L080AWA07-0, ATA disk drive
hdb: WDC WD200EB-00BHF0, ATA disk drive
blk: queue c03c9f40, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0cffffffff)
blk: queue c03c9084, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0cffffffff)
hdc: CREATIVEDVD1240E, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: YAMAHA CRW2200E, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
<hangs right here>

Thanks,
Shash

Re: RH-9 boot hangs from floppy bootdisk

[Alan Cox]

On Sul, 2003-09-21 at 20:48, Shash Chatterjee wrote:
> When booting from floppy, it loads the kernel/ramdisk from floppy, then 
> recognizes the HW and then hangs with the following message (at the 
> bottom).  Hitting any key causes a single "keyboard: unknown keysequence 
> 0e .." and then I have to hard-reset to recover.

Firstly try booting with the additional option "ide=nodma". That will
hopefully get you installed but slowly and able to update to a newer
kernel.

Re: RH-9 boot hangs from floppy bootdisk

[Shash Chatterjee]

Alan,

Thanks for the suggestion, certainly works far better than before. 
Disabling DMA on IDE does allow me to boot right up.  I was able to use 
up2date and install the 2.4.20-20.9 kernel.  I then made a new bootdisk 
using mkbootdisk.  Booting using the new kernel from floppy got a bit 
further, it actually loaded the kernel fro /dev/hdb2.  But hung after it 
got to "Enabling Swap ..".   Any more ideas?

I am now about to copy the boot sector using dd and using Win-XP's 
loader to load it to see if it helps.

Should I be using an even newer kernel?  Which one is known to work with 
RH-9 (I haven't kept up with building kernels and libc compatibilities 
in a long time, not since Slackware '97 days :-)?

Shash

Alan Cox wrote:
> On Sul, 2003-09-21 at 20:48, Shash Chatterjee wrote:
> 
>>When booting from floppy, it loads the kernel/ramdisk from floppy, then 
>>recognizes the HW and then hangs with the following message (at the 
>>bottom).  Hitting any key causes a single "keyboard: unknown keysequence 
>>0e .." and then I have to hard-reset to recover.
> 
> 
> Firstly try booting with the additional option "ide=nodma". That will
> hopefully get you installed but slowly and able to update to a newer
> kernel.
>