Hi,
I am having some real problems booting the current boot disks for potato
on my Dell PowerEdge 6300 server system. The problem appears to occur
when the rescue disk kernels probes for hardware. Everytime it begins to
probe for SCSI hardware the machine just dies. I lose video signal and I
end up having to power cycle the machine.
On an identical system one of my colleagues installed RedHat 5.2 without
much trouble once we figured out the boot options. Logically, I thought
that the same kernel boot options would work for Debian. Unfortunately
they did not.
The machines both have two Adaptec 7890 and one Adaptec 7860 SCSI chipsets
installed. Each machine also has a gigabyte of memory and four Intel
Pentium II Xeons installed. In order to get RedHat to work we had to fool
the kernel into thinking that it had less than a gig of memory since it
can't seem to handle more then about 1020MB (confirmation anyone?) of
memory. Second we also had to tell the kernel to prevent the aic7xxx
driver from probing since it causes the system to crash if it does probe.
Here is the boot line:
boot: linux mem=1000M aic7xxx=no_probe
The RedHat boot disk does no probing at all since SCSI drivers appear to
be loaded during the installation process, not during the boot process.
OTOH, Debian's kernel loads several SCSI drivers (right?) which appears to
be causing my system to crash. The system crashes right after the IDE
detection boot step.
Is it possible to shut off all SCSI support at the "boot:" prompt? If
not, can anyone suggest a solution? Since RedHat's boot technique appears
to work well in situations like mine (new hardware, probing causes
crashes), can we or should we do something similar?
Are there any new boot disks available besides the ones that were released
last on 12/29? I can't make my own boot disks since I currently don't
have access to Debian system and I don't want to use master or va to
create boot disk images.
Any suggestions or comments?
Thanks,
-Ossama
______________________________________________________________________
Ossama Othman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
58 60 1A E8 7A 66 F4 44 74 9F 3C D4 EF BF 35 88 1024/8A04D15D 1998/08/26
