Subject: Resend - Re: More questions about installing ARM Linux

From: [email-masked] (John Lagrue)
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 23:40:35 +0100 (BST)

Thankyou for the help so far; but I still have more problems :-)

When I first try running the !linux app with the -bootkernel switch
with the rpc kernel that I retrieved from the ARM Linux pages it seems
to start up OK, but then goes off trying to find the hda and hdb
harddiscs, and never gets any further than slowly reporting that
they don't appear to be answering some irq requests; it does however
correctly identify the discs. It does not however recognise that they
have been partitioned. Which leads me to my second worry: 

When I run !PartMan, I specify the IDEFS partition 7, and have to
enter the geometry as given to me by fsck. Fsck gives me the disc
size in bytes, so !PartMan gets the logical disc size correct as
500Mb, with  Sector size 512, heads 16, sectors 63 after I tell it
that this must mean 1016 tracks. However, though it shows me the
partition with start sector 0, end sector 1024127, it won't actually
let me do anything. The 'New' menu option  does not do anything at
all. I presume that this is because it realises that the partition
covers the whole logical disc, but I cannot see how to alter that.

I am using ICS IDE card with 2x 1Gb drives, partitioned into 6 logical
drives all smaller than 512Mb. RiscPC 600, RISC OS 3.5

Any thoughs as to where I go from here? How do I persuade the kernel
to look at my IDEFS partitions?

Any thoughts or suggestions?

JDL

-- 
John Lagrue

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From: Russell King - ARM Linux Admin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Oct 1997 10:27:22 +0100 (BST)

John Lagrue writes:
>--cut--
>--cut--

> correctly identify the discs.

This is a known problem, and a fax has been sent to Baildon Electronics.
However, since I don't have an ICS interface card, I can't debug it.  The
obvious problems have been fixed to the docs that Baildon supplied, but it
still doesn't work, and I don't know why.  I am waiting a reply.

> It does not however recognise that they have been partitioned.
> Which leads me to my second worry: 

> covers the whole logical disc, but I cannot see how to alter that.

It may be possible to use the ICS partitioning scheme - in other words,
use ICS partition manager to setup a two new partitions at the end of
the disk (and when the Linux kernel works with the ICS IDE card properly)
reformat these partitions to be ext2 and swap.  I have no idea what
ICS IDEFS will make of them though.
   _____
  |_____| ------------------------------------------------- ---+---+-
  |   |        Russell King        [email-masked]        --- ---
  | | | |    http://www.arm.uk.linux.org/~rmk/home.html      /  /  |
  | +-+-+                                                     --- -+-
  /   |               THE developer of ARM Linux              |+| /|\
 /  | | |                                                     ---  |
    +-+-+ -------------------------------------------------  /\\\  |

---

From: Russell King - ARM Linux Admin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Oct 1997 10:27:22 +0100 (BST)

---

From: Brian Brunswick <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 1997 11:15:44 +0100 (BST)

> have been partitioned. Which leads me to my second worry: 
I just begun playing about with it (spurred by the clan disk) and
this happens to me about 50% of the time on a Risc PC 700 with normal IDE.
Maybe theres a timing problem with something getting in the way of the
bootloader startup (adfsbuffers?)

At the moment I'm stuck because the install disks refuse to set up the
boot map or something at the last stage of install because they can't find
a kernel - where am I supposed to put the kernel in the install tree for
it to find it?

I've been unable to read any man pages for loadmap because they're all
packaged up, of course, and I haven't had the energy to manually unpackage
them (I vaguely remember rpms are just compressed archives) 

When I manually told the kernel booted from adfs to go for the correct
root partition it got as far as a login prompt, but there wasn't a root
password. I went back to the install disks and added one, but now it just
drops back to login immediately again. Then I went home.

It doesn't seem to understand the EtherH card that I have (which RiscBSD
did work with) so I went with the route of tarring all the install
tree up on the RiscBSD system, putting it on adfs, then unpacking
it to a manually made partition using the command prompt from the install
disks. Only slight hassles with the irritating redhat compressed install
environment, but then I've been through that fight on 86s. 
cpio -H tar turned out useful - something I wasn't aware that it did.

--
The past is a fading dream, the future mere speculation - live for the moment!
Brian Brunswick  [email-masked]    Disclaimer.  Short sig rules OK

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From: "FABIAN PATINO (BIANCCIO)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 1997 15:59:23 -0500 (EST)

I have a problem whit my linux instalation: the instalation disk can not
see my sound blaster. what can i do to install linux from my cd?

---

From: Russell King - ARM Linux Admin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 1997 23:20:01 +0100 (BST)

FABIAN PATINO writes:
> I have a problem with my linux instalation: the instalation disk can
> not see my sound blaster. what can i do to install linux from my cd?

What soundblaster?

In what way does it not find your CD.  Is your CD drive found, or does
it say that the drive does not contain a RedHat CD?
   _____
  |_____| ------------------------------------------------- ---+---+-
  |   |        Russell King        [email-masked]        --- ---
  | | | |    http://www.arm.uk.linux.org/~rmk/home.html      /  /  |
  | +-+-+                                                     --- -+-
  /   |               THE developer of ARM Linux              |+| /|\
 /  | | |                                                     ---  |
    +-+-+ -------------------------------------------------  /\\\  |