Debian install problems

[Eric Richardson]

Robert A. Klahn wrote:

> Eric:
> 
> I think your problems might be more hardware than software. I think your IDE hard drive, or perhaps the CDROM drive, is suspect.
> 
> The first thing I would do is boot off the rescue floppy and see if I can read the hard disk and CD-ROM without issue.
> 
> 1) boot off the rescue floppy and get to a root shell prompt.....
> 2) Read the entire hard disk (this will take quite a while, depending upon the size of the drive):
>      dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=64k
> 3) dd will either read the entire hard disk without issue, or will barf with an I/O error.
> 4) do the same for the CD-ROM drive. Put in a cd, DONT MOUNT IT, and repeat number 2, just with "if=/dev/hdc", or hdb, or whereever your drive is.


The dd program copied all the blocks from input to output. The cd at 
/dev/hdb just didn't seem to do anything.

Here is some info from boot up.
hda: ST32140A ATA Disk
ide0 at Ox1f0-0x1f7 0x3f6 on irq 14
hda: ST32140A 2015m x/128kb Cache CHS=4095/16/163
Partition check
hda: [PTBL][1023/64/63] hda1 hda2:

Just wondering. There are some BOS settings for the ide devices.
Do I need to set the BIOS like the 4095/16/163?
Is this weird that the partition check shows a different set of numbers, 
1023/64/63?

 
> Its also possible that your floppy set is bad. Floppys are notoriously poor media. You may want to try recreating them.

The floppy was bad when I tried this morning. I made a new one and the 
system did install(at least I was able to complete all the steps) but on 
boot it just printed the following.

L 40 40 40 40 ... forever until I hit the reset switch

 
> I also think there is a BIOS upgrade to permit booting off the CDROM drive. This would be your best choice, if possible, as CDROM is much more reliable.


This sounds like a good idea but is this firmware update capable or does the chip 
have to be replaced. This is a pretty old system also. 



> Bob.
> 
> On Thu, 14 Feb 2002 15:25:10 -0700
> Eric Richardson <eric.richardson@milagrosoft.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Hi,
>>
>>I'm having a lot of problems with a debian 2.2 install.