Append root=/dev/sda1 to your boot command in /etc/aboot.conf. (I assume you're using aboot not milo?)
Did you partition this disk or format /dev/sda without any partitions?
The lack of a partition table might cause this problem. Why do you have
the message "Unable to read /dev/sda"? It should always be sda1 or
sda2.
If sector 0 truly is bad, this drive may be unusable. Many modern
drives however keep an internal bad blocks list and will reallocate a
block from their spares when one goes bad. Play around with the
smartctl program in the debian package smartsuite, and try 'badblocks -n
/dev/sda' after booting off a cd-rom (/dev/sda? must not be mounted).
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I recently got an alpha 164LX that had a working tru64 installation and it
> booted fine. Now I've been trying to install the box with debian, but I've
> run into problems with my scsi drive (seagate medalist st34520n). I installed
> debian once and all went seemingly fine, but when I tried to boot the freshly
> installed base system kernel paniced because it could not read the partition
> table of the drive (that had the root partition). The error message was
> something like:
>
> partition check:
> sda: scsi0: MEDIUM ERROR on channel 0, id 0, lun 0,
> CDB: Read(10) 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00
> info fld=0x0, Current sd08:00: sense key Medium Error
> Additional sense indicates Unrecovered read error
> scsidisk I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
> unable to read partition table
> VFS: cannot open root device 08:01
> Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:01
>
> Restarting the installation cannot check partition table of the drive at boot
> time, but continues until it's time to partition the drive and tries to start
> fdisk in an infinite loop. Running fdisk on the second terminal produces an
> error message "Unable to read /dev/sda".
>
> I suspect that the drive is dying. Is there anything else to do? Could this
> be a "feature" caused by the late tru64 installation?
--
Cheers,
Bob McElrath [Univ. of California at Davis, Department of Physics]
"It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the
votes." -- Joseph Stalin
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