Hi there!

Happy new year to all of you!

I am running Slack 10.0 and today I installed my Pinnacle PCTV Pro. Winshit works... but then I tried to boot Slackware... and wham! Stops while hotplugging or something. No booting anymore!

I stops with this errors, which tell me absolutly nothing!:

Error-Pic

Only thing I can do ist STRG+Alt+Del ...

I tried to boot Damn Small Linux (like Knoppix) and it booted like it should. But this does not fix anything :-) Just nice to know...

Can someone tell me how to get around this? Any help is welcome!

Greetings, Sascha

I think your ramdisk has ext3 and jbd modules loaded which can give you problems like the one shown because it did for me. To fix this, use Knoppix or any LIVE LINUX CD and mount the boot partition or any partition that contains /boot directory. Next decompress initrd.gz with gzip. Then mount initrd as a loop device. Fourth, find the file load_kernel_modules in the loop device and load it up in a text editor. Comment jbd and ext3 lines by placing # in the beginning of each line. Unmount the loop device or image file and use gzip to compress initrd. Then reboot the computer. Slackware should then work.

BTW, modules in the ramdisk file have to be decompress in order for it to be loaded by busybox (a universal Linux program that can run as a certain program depending on the name of symbolic link).

Hi there!

This sounds like a plan ... thanks very much so far!

But what I didn't get by now is, what exactly the error is?

Thanks again, greetings - Sascha

Ok... I tried it out some minutes ago... but I ran into problems.

First of all my initrd was not zipped ... not really a problem I think. But...

Can't mount it. Not because of an error ... more because I don't know how to do this ...

I mounted the hd where my /boot is on. Then I moved to "/mnt/hdb2/boot". Next I tried to mount it somewhere:

mount -o loop initrd /mnt/cdrom

But I was told I should give a filesystem.

mount -o loop -t ext3 initrd /mnd/cdrom

was my try. Ext3 is the FS I use on my Slackware box. But that didn't work. I was told I chose the wrong fs-type or something like that.

Can you give me a hint with that?

Something else, that came up my mind ... if I remember right, I didn't have an initrd until I added a bootsplash to my Box ... is that possible? If so, does that make any changes to your tip?

Thanks again, Sascha

The ramdisk file or initrd is ext2. If you do not know the filesystem, use auto. It takes more time for the kernel to detect the filesystem but it is smart picking the right filesystem.

The ramdisk file or initrd is not really needed if the filesystem you are using is compiled in the kernel instead being as a module.

Probably the error is the module ext3 is duplicating it self in memory, but I do not have enough experience in Linux to verify this.

Just a guess but maybe hotplug does not under stand the new card correctly or is not compatiable with current modules. If hotplug is setup this way, one can add ' bttv ' to the blacklist at /etc/hotplug/blacklist. I am guessing it is trying to use this one. It might be using something else but not my area of knowledge.

Brian1
" Google the Linux way @ http://www.google.com/linux "