Package: installation-reports
Version: sarge-i386-netinst.20040906.iso

Hello installer hackers and list readers,
  i tried an install once more,
  but this time didnt get far due to my particular hardware.

I'd read about horrible things happening in partitioner,
  and thought it prudent to not risk my main harddisk's partition table,
  so i dug in that pile of scrap that i call my hobby room
  to see if i couldnt find an old one.
I found a 585 MB ide, and a 1GB scsi plus scsi controller but without cable.
I had gotten this scsi disk years ago, and never tried it,
  so i thought i'd try if kernel recognized scsi controller,
  and plugged into a free slot.
This caused a bios error when it tried to set up scsi devices ;
  bios reacted to it by turning off boot-from-harddisk,
  though it still allows boot from cd.
I dont have password for this pc, and removing battery didnt help.

Anyway, not an immediate problem,
  because i had already got a daily snapshot iso from www.debian.org,
  namely that of sarge-i386-netinst.20040906.iso,
  except that it's filename doesnt include a date.

[wishlist] add a date (or other version identifier)
  to filenames of daily snapshots,
  so some install reports on debian-boot become clearer.

I had burned this iso to a disc, so next i tried to install with it,
  so i typed 'linux' <enter> ,
  and got :
        Loading /install/vmlinuz...
        Loading /install/initrd.gz...
        Ready
        _   <- blinking

That's all it did.
  if instead of 'linux <enter>' typing only <enter>,
  same thing happens, except screen is cleared first.

This looked like same blinking underscore that i got when
   bios didnt boot from disk and there was no cd in drive.
Does installer go via bios ? or is this a bug ?

I got woody discs out of drawer, and tried with these :
  it could (and did) install linux on this 585MB disk.

[not a bug really] maybe use same method woody's installer did ?

However, woody's installer can not make this disk bootable (lilo fails)
  (i tried that because i wanted to take disk over to an other old pc).
I assume this is also due to bios,
  as i never hit a boot-floppies bug in woody's installer yet.

Then i noticed a difference between woody installer and sarge installer :

[wishlist+] sarge installer CD is not usable as a rescue disk.

woody CD is, so i can boot there with arguments :
        rescbf24 root=/dev/hda10 hdc=ide-scsi
but i cant update that kernel if there's a security problem with it,
and i can't use it to run sarge,
  as it uses a different 2.4 kernel (or can i ?),
and i can't run kernel 2.6 .

though i was thinking of buying new hardware anyway,
  i still want to keep this machine runnable,
  so i would appreciate if someone could give me a pointer to how to :
  * change kernel on the fly,
  * clear bios password on an ancient 200MHz PackardBell, or
  * create a bootable CD image with a custom kernel

no need to CC me, i subscribed a couple of days ago.


have fun,

  Siward

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