Hi all!
I came across a rather odd problem with the rescue disk set under
RHL 5.2:
I recently acquired an 486DX2/66 machine which I intend to use as
firewall. The hardware:
- Vesa Local Bus (VLB) motherboard (Chicony CH-471A, Ver. 1.0)
- Intel Overdrive 486DX2/66
- 16MB RAM
- VLB Spea V7 Mirage graphics adapter
- VLB multi-I/O card (IDE + Serial + Parallel + Game) with Serial,
Parallel and Game port(s) disabled via jumpers
- ISA multi I/O card (no IDE, just Serial/Parallel/Game - this was
necessary, as the original card had 16450 serial chips, i.e. no FIFOs
and I happened to have that card lying around).
- 3c503 NIC
- 340MB Quantum IDE drive
Now, this machine is replacing an existing box, so I went and cloned the
drive in that box by installing the 340MB drive as hdb in that box,
partitioning that drive and copying everything over using tar. Of
course, the resulting drive wasn't bootable, so I tried what I usually
do in this situation: I move the cloned drive into its new home and boot
the machine from a rescue disk set (generated rescue disk plus the one
with "supp.img"), then run lilo and Bob's your uncle.
Not so this time: After reading the first and the second disk
successfully, the machine freezes with "Can't open initial console" -
even though the same set of rescue disks has worked fine on several
other machines, from 386 to K6-2.
I finally decided to try a desperate measure: I got my RHL 5.2 CD out
and tried to run an "Upgrade". However, the first try failed with "Boot
failed" on trying to boot from the installation floppy. I had to use the
updated boot.img available on Red Hat's ftp servers to get the machine
to boot. I then deselected all packages and in fact nothing got
upgraded, but to my great joy I got the option to run lilo at the end of
that pseudo-upgrade, so everything was fine after.
Two questions remain:
1) Why did the rescue disk fail? (What does that message "Can't open
inital console" mean, anyway?)
2) Why did the original boot.img fail? Red Hat's Errata doesn't mention
any such problems with regard to the new image file, even though they
seemingly solved my problem...
Any insight is appreciated, as I'd like to prevent surprises like that
in the future... ;-)
Thanks in advance,
Thomas
--
"Look, Ma, no obsolete quotes and plain text only!"
Thomas Ribbrock | http://www.bigfoot.com/~kaytan | ICQ#: 15839919
"You have to live on the edge of reality - to make your dreams come true!"
--
To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe"
as the Subject.
