Hi!

I have recently installed slackware on my machine which was done pretty painfully with the help of a friend. Everything was working smoothly though and I was going through the O' Reilly Running Linux 4th edition book which started making me familiar with the entire OS and commands needed. When I reached the point of having to create a boot floppy disk, I used the 2 commands needed in the exact way that they were mentioned in the book (p. 122 for whoever has it):

rdev /boot/vmlinuz
This command gave me back that the device is /dev/hda3

then I issued:
dd if=/boot/vmlinuz of=/dev/fd0 bs=8192
in order to copy the kernel file on a floppy which I previously had formatted using fdformat

Then I shut down to try the boot floppy by trying to boot from it and it didn't work because of "not enough input data" so I figured that the file I passed into the floppy was not enough or that I had to pass the /boot/linux file as well. As a result I tried to boot again from my hard drive normally and, guess what: IT WON'T BOOT BY GIVING ME A KERNEL PANIC after trying to boot hdf1. The exact message I am getting after a while and many attempts to load hdf1 is:

hdf1: bad access: block 16, count=2
end_request: I/O error, dev 21:41 (hdf), sector 16
read_super_block: bread failed (dev 21:41, block 8, size 1024)
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 21:41

I am stuck now and don't know how to boot so I can move on, which causes an enormous problem. I haven't changed anything so I don't know how this might have occured and I am pretty sure that all the data is there. However I can NOT boot from floppy since the floppy was not created in the first place for me to use it and fix the problem.

Any recommendations? Any help would be highly appreciated because I am new to Linux and it seems to be ahead of my so far knowledge.
I was also trying to boot from my Slackware installation CD, which of course works and gives me a prompt, but I cannot understand what to do in order to avoid the installation and access the files already in the machine (the prompt is root@slackware# instead of root@hostname#)

Please help in any way possible. If help is not possible, where can I find the necessary information I need in order to boot my machine?? Any suggestions???

Hi,
Is your Slackware install on hdf1? It looks like it's on hda3...anyway.
Try this:
Pop in your slack CD and at the boot prompt type:
bare.i root=/dev/hda3 noinitrd
and that should get your system booted. Then, copy over a new bare.i kernel to /boot/vmlinuz and rerun lilo.

In short, here's the commands you'll issue:
[At the boot prompt]: bare.i root=/dev/hda3 noinitrd
cp /mnt/cdrom/kernels/bare.i/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz
lilo
reboot

Good luck!
--Taj

Thanks a lot to tmorton for the recommendation!!!

Unfortunately it did not work though. It says that it cannot mount root fs on 03:03 this time so that i can move on with the cp command. By the way though, while trying to boot, I am able to see that hdf is my ATA drive that is 160 GB big. Since this is a drive bigger than 134GB, it was recommended that I connect it on the provided PCI card that came with it instead of directly on the IDE interface so that data would not be lost and best performance would be assured. That installation was done under Windows 98 which is also installed on a different physical drive on the computer. However Linux did not have any problem identifying it until now. Therefore, I cannot explain this behaviour.

If this is the problem, any ideas of how to correct it?
If this is not the problem, any other recommendations or places to look at?

Thanx a lot!!

Hi,
Hmmm...
Donno. Did the system ever boot correctly?
If so, you might want to try booting with the CD and just hitting enter at the prompt.

Then, when booted, do this:

I'm still thinking that it's your kernel that's the problem--however, I could be wrong. Have you searched the archives?
--Taj

Thanx a lot!

Actually I have tried that already and the message is:

mount: special device /dev/hdf1 does not exist

It is the same with hda3 also and any hd i try
In fact the respond I get after a simple mount command is only
/dev/fd2 on / type ext2 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)

Nothing else seems to be mounted

Is there any place to check for info on the same subject apart from the forum?
I cannot seem to have a way to get out of this unless somebody has experienced a similar problem I guess. What are my options???? Can I somehow download or find a boot floppy from somewhere else and use that one to boot???


Thanx a lot for the help!!!!

Hi, you can make a boot floppy from the install disk using Windows or Linux. Under Windows, move to the bootdisks dir and type at the prompt:

rawrite a: bare.i

Make sure you've got a floppy in A:.
Then, pop that in and see if you can boot...did you make a rescue disk when you installed?
Also, were you ever able to boot without this error?
--Taj

Oh, here's another thing to try.

ls /dev/hda*
ls /dev/hdf*

Please let me know what the output it.
--Taj

Thanx a lot!

Well the output for ls /dev/hda* is just
/dev/hda

and for ls /dev/hdf is just

/dev/hdf

Does this ring a bell or tell you sth on how to move on?

Hi,
From the output, it looks like you don't have any partitions on either hda or hdf, which seems very odd.
What exactly does the PCI card do? Your BIOS might be having trouble seeing the hard drives as well. Look up the detected HDDs in your BIOS and see what the primary master, secondary master, primary slave, and secondary slave are.
--Taj

Hi and thanx again!

My Maxtor 160 GB drive needs a PCI card in order to assure proper functionality. For this to work correctly under Windows 98 (and probably under Linux too), the primary IDE controller on board has to be disabled. Therefore my BIOS setup looks like this:

On board IDE-1 Controller: Disabled

On board Ide-2 Controller: Enabled
Master : Auto
Slave : Auto

Therefore, during booting Primary master and primary slave are not detected, secondary master is my Toshiba CD-ROM drive and secondary slave is also not detected since nothing is hooked up on it. Immediately after that, the Maxtor ATA 133 Controller takes over and tries to detect what is connected to the PCI card. The result of the detection is always:


D0 WDC AC34300L LBA 4104MB Ultra DMA 2
D1 Maxtor 6Y16OPO LBA 152GB Ultra DMA 6
D2 Not Detected
D3 Not Detected

IDE Bus Master Enabled



The configuration looks all right to me and it hasn't been changed after the Kernel Panic with respect to what it was looking like before I started having this problem.

Do you think it has been set up incorrectly? Should it have been set up differently?

By the way, when I boot normally in Linux without the Slackware CD in my drive, I see hdf drive being detected as the Maxtor one, which then cannot be mounted (bad access messages etc.) and eventually causes the Kernel Panic on hdf1. Can it be that suddenly it cannot "see" the Maxtor drive, even though it was seeing it until very recently. I didn't change anything though, so it seems really very odd.
As for hda, I definitely remember getting the response:
Root device /dev/hda3
after running the rdev command when my system was still up and running and therefore that is why I had assumed that this was wher= my kernel was initially loaded. Is this a correct assumption???

Thanx for the help!!!

Irakleas (crazy sound/music guy)

Hi,
It could be that the PCI card is causing the problem. Do you have a smaller hard drive that you could put in as the primary master? You could format this one and create a /boot partition, copy over the kernel and tell LILO to boot from that your first primary.

This may help, not sure:
http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules....article&sid=85

--Taj

Hi !

I think I have understood what is going on.
My 160GB drive hosts my 3 (boot, swap and main Linux) partitions.
Moreover, the computer's IDE only sees the CD drive on the enabled secondary channel (primary channel is disabled), since even the 4GB drive where Win98 is on, is hooked up to the PCI card together with the 160 GB one.

Since Linux looks for the boot partition on the first available partition after Windows, it would be much more efficient to set up my 4 GB partition to include Linux or at least the boot Linux partition, and try to hook it up on one of the motherboard's IDE controllers. After that I could reinstall Linux (and probably Red Hat 8.3 which supports 160 GB drives, or some distribution easier than Slackware.....at least for newcomers to the field such as myself). This would leave me with a 160 GB drive which can be easily mounted afterwards in Redhat. Plus all my OS partitions will be on the stable IDE mounted drive.

It sounds pretty optimistic for my current knowledge, but I think I can make it happen. What do you think about this idea. There has been no way for me to get Slackware to boot and even cfdisk, which should work even in the worst cases, causes Fatal Error messages, so I really don't know how else to move on.

Do you have any recommendations? What do you think of what I am planning to do?

Something important:
Is it possible to get all 4 necessary partitions (Win98 as ext2, Linux Boot, Linux Swap and Linux Red Hat) on the 4 GB drive? How much space should I allow for each of them??????????????????????


Thanx a lot for all the help!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Irakleas

Hi!

Why is the primary channel disabled? I've actually had some problems with cfdisk and Slackware when my primary channel was disabled. It was trying to open hda, which didn't exist.

Here's what I would do:
On you're 4GB IDE drive:
/boot: 10MB or less...just housing the kernel and other important stuff.
Windows: all remaining space.

You could have LILO then boot /dev/hdf3 as the root partition, which would contain everything else.

Sounds good to me. Does cfdisk say "could not open drive /dev/hda" or something like that?

Win98 as ext2?!? Windows needs to be installed on FAT or NTFS (actually, Win98 will only install on FAT. I wouldn't put everything on you're one 4GB drive...it would be really tight. Instead, you could just put /boot, LILO, and Win98 on the 4GB. See above.

Have fun!
--Taj

Sounds good and promising!

I will switch my 4GB drive to the motherboard's master IDE and put only Win98 (on a FAT32 partition of course and not an ext2 which was never the case) and the /boot Linux partition with LILO. The rest will go on the ATA drive, as long as the Redhat installation goes smoothly, which I assume that will result to it given an hdf ID, or whatever ID it is given.
Why do you mention hdf3 though and not hdf1 for the root partition???

...and Yes, The fatal error messages I am getting say: Cannot open disk drive as you mentioned.


Thanx a lot! I 'll get back with my progress later this week!!!!


Irakleas (crazy sound guy)