joshio

Ok, whew. Finally got it. For some reason, I couldn't get the boot manager to work, and I ended up using a Windows 98 boot floppy (lol!) and loadlin. I didn't have anything important on this box, so I actually just reinstalled from scratch and everything looks beautiful now. Thanks for all of your help!

I'm still working on this. I am a little limited with this piece of hardware, which may be where all of my headaches originate anyway. Just a little history, this is a Cisco Content Engine 560, and it does not have a video card (well, it has integrated video, but there is just a header on the motherboard which I have not been able to determine the pinout of), and best I can tell, it can only boot from either floppy or SCSI. I found this http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/, which I assume I can use to bootstrap a CD from (since there is an IDE header, I just can't seem to boot from it). This all depends on whether everything will work ok with my serial console cable, but I'll see if I can make it work. Thanks for your suggestion, and I'll get back once I've been able to test this. Thanks!

So I tried to make a grub config, and I installed grub. Now, I see the grub menu (I think) starting, but the system never boots. Here is the last thing that I see from grub: If I type, I see the cursor moving, and if I type and press enter, I see the cursor moving alot, but since I'm using the console port, I only get plain text, where grub must be trying to draw out a pseudo graphical menu which I never get. So, I've obviously not set up my config correctly, but I honestly understand grub's config less than lilo's, so if someone can give me some pointers, that would be great. I tried going over the man page, but when it starts talking about grub's device mapping table, I'm pretty much lost. That plus the fact that I can't seem to see grub's output doesn't help at all. Is there a way that I can make grub just dump plain text rather than trying to draw a menu?

I definately wouldn't mind giving grub a try, lilo isn't really usable when using the serial cable anyway (I just get a bunch of gibberish on the screen). The thing I don't understand is that the SCSI drive boots just fine after a dd from the IDE drive. It's just that when I reinstall lilo after booting back up that it does this. I'll see if I can muddle my way through getting grub set up tomorrow and see if that changes anything for me. Thanks!

Ok, so I uninstalled and reinstalled Lilo Now when I boot all I see is What does this mean?

Well, that's what I assumed. What I did after getting initrd set up the way I thought it should be was to boot from a floppy with the appropriate drivers and I ran 'dd if=/dev/discs/disc0/disc of=/dev/discs/disc1/disc bs=1024k' I went through the steps you mentioned above, changing fstab and lilo.conf and then I ran lilo again. I had to have missed something obvious along the trail, however. Here is my current partition table from /dev/sda Here is my /etc/fstab And here is /etc/lilo.conf I'm using the console statement because I don't have a monitor hooked up to this box, I'm just using the serial port along with hypertrm from my laptop. I'm going to try running lilo again to see if maybe it isn't taking correctly or something, and I'll post the results of that later.

Allright, so I tried several things, I rebuilt my initrd countless times and screwed this thing up multiple times. It is now working to the point where I have /dev/sda1 set up in fstab, and the system boots happily that way. However, it still requires the IDE drive to boot for some reason. Here are the last few lines of boot code that I get if I disconnnect the IDE drive: And here are the lines that appear to correspond from linuxrc What am I doing wrong here?

Ok, so I finally had a chance to rebuild the initrd and it now appears to work perfectly. I now have all of the /dev/sda's after boot and I dd'ed everything from the IDE drive to the first SCSI drive. My next question is: what configs will I have to change to tell Mandrake to boot from /dev/sda rather than /dev/hda? As long as I keep both hard drives plugged in, the system will boot from SCSI. However, if I remove the IDE drive, the system fails boot with "Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel." (Apparently it starts booting from the SCSI drive, and then at some point in the boot process is pointing back to the IDE drive?) Thanks again for your help!

I tried adding the sym53c8xx to /etc/modprobe.preload with no success. Since I want to get this system to be able to boot from the SCSI hard drives, will adding the modprobe commands to rc.local achieve this? I was also considering changing linuxrc inside of initrd so that it actually runs "modprobe sym53c8xx" rather than the 3 insmod commands that were added when I ran mkinitrd. I will perform some more testing tomorrow to see if I can get this to work correctly.

I am very new to Linux, so I'm sure I missed something obvious along my path (or completely and totally screwed something up). I am running Mandrake 10.1 and I am migrating from an older IDE hard drive to an older set of SCSI hard drives attached to a sym53c895 SCSI adapter. Running "modprobe sym53c8xx" loads the drivers correctly and I can see /dev/sda and /dev/sdb and all of the respective partitions. So, since I wanted to be able to boot from these devices, I ran "mkinitrd --with sym53c8xx /boot/initrd-2.6.8.1-12mdk-new.img 2.6.8.1-12mdk", which appeared to run successfully. I can't remember if there was something else I did along the way, but somehow I eventually got to the point where I now see the sym53c8xx driver loading at boot. However, after a boot, I do not see /dev/sda or /dev/sdb. I can run "modprobe -r sym53c8xx" and then "modprobe sym53c8xx" and this restores /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, but this is definately not what I am looking for. Here is everything that appears to be related to SCSI from /var/log/messages: Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: SCSI subsystem initialized Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: sym0: <895> rev 0x2 at pci 0000:00:0f.0 irq 5 Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: sym0: No NVRAM, ID 7, Fast-40, LVD, parity checking Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: sym0: SCSI BUS has been reset. Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: scsi0 : sym-2.1.18j Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: Vendor: IBM Model: IC35L036UCD210-0 Rev: S5BS Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 03 Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: sym0:0:0: tagged command queuing enabled, command queue depth 16. Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: scsi(0:0:0:0): Beginning Domain Validation Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: sym0:0: wide asynchronous. Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: sym0:0: FAST-40 WIDE SCSI 80.0 MB/s ST (25.0 ns, offset 31) Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: scsi(0:0:0:0): Ending Domain Validation Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: Vendor: IBM Model: IC35L036UCD210-0 Rev: S5BS Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 03 Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: sym0:1:0: tagged command queuing enabled, command queue depth 16. Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: scsi(0:0:1:0): Beginning Domain Validation Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: sym0:1: wide asynchronous. Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: sym0:1: FAST-40 WIDE SCSI 80.0 MB/s ST (25.0 ns, offset 31) Jul 25 18:07:33 localhost kernel: scsi(0:0:1:0): Ending Domain Validation Here is an lsmod initially after boot: Module Size Used by nfsd 189408 8 exportfs 4736 1 nfsd lockd 58344 2 nfsd sunrpc 127652 2 nfsd,lockd md5 3584 1 ipv6 230916 16 rfcomm 32348 0 l2cap 19876 5 rfcomm bluetooth 39076 4 rfcomm,l2cap maestro3 32104 0 soundcore 7008 1 maestro3 ac97_codec 16844 1 maestro3 af_packet 16072 2 usbhid 41088 0 floppy 55088 0 ide-cd 37280 0 cdrom 37724 1 ide-cd loop 12520 0 intel-agp 19584 1 agpgart 27752 1 intel-agp uhci-hcd 28752 0 usbcore 103172 4 usbhid,uhci-hcd e100 28160 0 mii 4224 1 e100 sym53c8xx 75860 0 scsi_transport_spi 11200 1 sym53c8xx scsi_mod 103404 2 sym53c8xx,scsi_transport_spi ext3 120680 2 jbd 49080 1 ext3 And again after removing/readding with modprobe: Module Size Used by sd_mod 19232 0 sym53c8xx 76212 0 scsi_transport_spi 11424 1 sym53c8xx scsi_mod 104044 3 sd_mod,sym53c8xx,scsi_transport_spi nfsd 189408 8 exportfs 4736 1 nfsd lockd 58344 2 nfsd sunrpc 127652 2 nfsd,lockd md5 3584 1 ipv6 230916 16 rfcomm 32348 0 l2cap 19876 5 rfcomm bluetooth 39076 4 rfcomm,l2cap maestro3 32104 0 soundcore 7008 1 maestro3 ac97_codec 16844 1 maestro3 af_packet 16072 2 usbhid 41088 0 floppy 55088 0 ide-cd 37280 0 cdrom 37724 1 ide-cd loop 12520 0 intel-agp 19584 1 agpgart 27752 1 intel-agp uhci-hcd 28752 0 usbcore 103172 4 usbhid,uhci-hcd e100 28160 0 mii 4224 1 e100 ext3 120680 2 jbd 49080 1 ext3 I'm sure there is something amazingly obvious that I have either left out or done wrong, so please go easy on me here. Thanks in advance for any tips/suggestions you can offer.