Blast, I screwed my kernel up
 

I was trying to install some new experimental nforce nic drivers last night, so I recompiled my kernel following the instructions in the sticky thread. All went well except I disabled some joystick stuff that in turn the sound driver needed to load, so I recompiled a second time but instead of running "make install" I just manually ran:

cp System.map /boot/System.map
cp arch/i386/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz

Now when I try to reboot I get this error when I try to boot into Linux from LILO: "Loading LinuxEBDA is big; kernel setup stack overlaps LILO second stage" and it hangs. I'm guessing where I went wrong in two places: firstlyl I didn't back up an old good entry in lilo.conf and secondly I must not have manually copied the new kernel correctly.

I booted off the Slack CD and mounted my hard-disk and tried restoring /boot/System/map and vmlinuz with known-good files from the CD but I still get the same error. I also tried to compile a new kernel right in there so I could just use make install but the make program is unable to find gcc (since root is mounted it is no longer "/") and I was unsuccessful in getting make to find it. Am I screwed or is there anything else I can try?

Re: Blast, I screwed my kernel up
 

Did you remember to run /sbin/lilo?

No I never ran it :o

I tried to run it really quick by booting off the CD, mounting, then running it, but it says something like "Don't know how to handle error 0x0008". I guess it really doesn't like to be in /mnt/tmp/sbin/. Is there anyway I can tell it that it has a new path?

I think you should be able to actually boot into your computer using the CD...you just have to specify the root partition...the slackware CD has instructions, I believe.

Great, that helped a lot, thanks. I was abled to correctly recompile the kernel and boot normally. However, now my usb mouse doesn't work. GPM gives an oops with a "/dev/mouse: No such device". Do you have any idea what happened?

Slackware does have instructions, and they're simple enough. Just pop the CD in and enter "bare.i root=/dev/hdxx noinitrd ro" at the console, that'll usually boot fine, then make sure lilo.conf is okay and run /sbin/lilo. I had this same error about a week ago, without actually changing anything :confused: but running lilo fixed it and I was able to boot normally again.

[edit]lol I was too late :D[/edit]

For the gpm oops, make sure you have USB support compiled in the kernel or loaded as modules (uhci_hcd/ohci_hcd and usbcore) then try "gpm -t imps2" or just use "mouseconfig" to set up gpm correctly. *Should* work.

Hmmm, it looks to me as if USB support is compiled, usbcore is loaded but I can't find the other one that you suggested, where would the module be at?

Here is how my kernel is configured and my USB mouse works fine...

(*) Support for USB
(M) EHCI (USB 2.0 Support)
(M) UHCI
(*) USB Human Interface Device (full HID)
(*) HID Input Layer Support
(*) /dev/hiddev raw HID device support

The modules that need to load are...

ehci_hcd (If you have USB 2.0)
uhci_hcd



I don't think there are any other USB options that would keep the mouse from working. HTH.

EDIT: Well, I found out why I was getting errors on some builds and no errors on other builds. The difference is being root: when I'm root I get the weird syntax errors, if I'm logged in as a normal user things compile normally. Why is this?

Also, I have gotten the kernel compiled correctly, I just had to dig around to find that the module I needed for the nic was forcedeth and not eth0 :o. Also I had to load the hid module for mouse support. The only one left I can't figure out now is which sound module to load for Santa Cruz support.