Re: BIOS and basic hardware drivers

Tauno Voipio <tauno.voipio@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Haines Brown wrote:
I have a situation in which a debian cd installation disk won't boot,
but a Knoppix livecd disk will boot, and so I need to understand better
how the initial drivers get loaded. If I try to boot the debian cd
installation disk without offering any alternative boot method in BIOS,
I get a boot failure, system halted error.
For details, Google for 'El Torito specification'.

Tauno, thanks for the claification.

I guess that the boot actually succeeds, but the
installation CD boot image does not understand
your drive, but Knoppix does.

Possible, but it is a surprise to experience this when I've used the
drive in plenty of other situations, including installing debian. It is
a rather common drive.

To add fuel to the fire, I got my hands on another installer cd for
debian etch, put together by someone else. This one booted. However,
when the installer got to the point of copying files from the CD, it
failed. In other words, the drive is accessed to the extent of starting
the installation, but not when it comes to downloading files.

I'm going to try to swap out RAM to see what happens, but obviously some
RAM must have been used to get to this point.

--

Haines Brown, KB1GRM



.

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