Hi all, I've just completed construction of a dual PIII system and I'm having some difficulties installing Debian 2.2 on it.
Hardware: MSI 694D Pro AIR Dual Socket 370 MB with VIA 694DP chipset, Promise FastTrack 100 Lite Raid Controller (PDC20265), VIA VT82C686A chipset (APM, AC97 Audio, UDMA 33/66 IDE) 2 PIII/1000EB OEM chips 384 Megs PC133 SDRAM 2 IBM GXP60 60 Meg drives in a mirroring array on the ATA-100 interface. I'm trying to install Debian 2.2r3. I downloaded the 3-disc set from one of the mirror sites (ISO-images, set the system to boot from CD, and fired it up. First problem: the installation kernel wouldn't see my disk drives. Research on the Debian site pointed to CD#4 which would boot a kernel with the UDMA-66 SCSI drivers in it. (Not exactly UDMA-100, but what the hell.) Looked EVERYWHERE, could not find a CD image of this disk. DID find a folder with a kernel, a tar archive full of drivers, and some misc files. Fine, I could make a CD, right? Well, I downloaded the stuff, and tried to match it up to the format of the other 3 CDs. Couldn't make sense out of it, so I tried plan B: there was another folder with floppy disk images in it. I downloaded those, wrote them to a bunch of floppies, and voila: the installation program could see my drives and I could get to the partitioning program. Second Problem: The partitioning program, cfdisk, kept hanging while trying to initialize my 40 meg /usr partition (/dev/hde8) Tried making it smaller, that didn't work. Tried making another partiton after it; that DID work, but then I couldn't initialize the [new] last partition. Finally, I moved it up in the order, so that this arrangement got initialized and mounted: /dev/hde1 1.2 megs swap /dev/hde2 5 megs root /dev/hde5 10 megs /home /dev/hde6 40 megs /usr /dev/hde7 2.5 megs /tmp /dev/hde8 1.3 megs /var Third problem: During install, the machine randomly hangs. It randomly hung during the partitioning process earlier too, but I figured that was due to cfdisk screwing up. Now Debian's docs say that the UDMA-66 kernel is "patched" for the Promise SCSI drivers, and the lack of a 4th disk in the ISO install set indicates to me that UDMA-66 support is an afterthought. Before I go and tear this thing apart and try the following: Installing with only one processor; Installing without the RAID array; Installing with a disk on the standard IDE port; Installing a copy of Red Hat or some other distribution I thought I'd run my experiences by the group to try to determine if: a) the SMP kernel supplied in 2.2r3 potato (sorry I don't know what version it is) has problems; b) my hardware might have problems; c) my hardware is not supported; d) Debian's install program has known issues with "newer" hardware (why isn't a UDMA-capable kernel part of the "vanilla" package?) Any thoughts, warnings, tips, or comments would be greatly appreciated. :o) Rich Cloutier President, C*O SYSTEM SUPPORT SERVICES www.sysupport.com ********************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the *body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter: unsubscribe gnhlug **********************************************************
