Hello,

Here's my strange story. I had an IBM Thinkpad T23 (work laptop) with dual boot Windows 2000 / Linux (Fedora Core 1) and everything was working fine.

Recently, I started having hardware problems with my T23 (known memory issue) so they took my T23 to send it for repair and gave me another one (T23 as well) with my old hard disk.
Windows 2000 was working fine but Linux wouldn't boot anymore.

I knew there were several subversions of the T23 so I thought I might just reinstall Linux and put FC2 in the meantime. The installation went fine but when I tried to reboot ... same issue, I get the following error messages:

Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.
audit( ....): initialized
Buffer I/O error on device hda, logical block 0
Buffer I/O error on device hda, logical block 0
Red Hat nash version 3.5.22 starting
mkrootdev: label / not found
mount: error 2 mounting ext3
pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot,sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
umount /initrd/proc failed:2
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.


I tried several things:
- Update the T23 BIOS (there are some know issues with Linux and old T23 BIOS)
- Boot in Rescue mode to check the partition table which is the following:
hda1: Windows 2000 NTFS
hda2: Linux (/boot)
hda3: Linux swap
hda4: Linux (/)
If I do e2label /dev/hda2, I get a "hda2: no such device or address" error
- Although, I didn't touch the partition table when installing FC2, I tried to pass the drive geometry as a kernel parameter

Still not working

Any idea ?

Thanks in advance.

AoS

After some more investigation, I saw that I was getting a lot of DMA errors at boot time in rescue mode.

So, I tried to add the "ide=nodma" option at boot time and it works

What I don't understand is:
- why did it work at installation time ?
- why does this T23 require this option if my original one was working fine without