Re: asrock, problem with nic after windows-boot - Exact Opposite issue the OP is having

Moe Trin wrote:
OK - let's clarify this - when you reboot to get it to work, it this a
power-cycle (or front panel reset button), or just the three-finger-salute?


It doesn't seem to matter whether or not ctrl+alt+del was used - or
logout/shutdown, from the Debian(KDE) menu, or if it's from a 'cold'
boot - no difference either way :-(

The rational is that a power-cycle or front panel reset switch does a full
hardware reset - there actually is a wire on the motherboard going to all
ISA and/or PCI sockets and the "important" chips on the motherboard (such
as the CPU) labeled /RESET.

I like to think of myself as more of a 'hardware' guy than 'software'
guy, and you seem to have quite a good understanding of hardware
(especially older systems) - which leads me to my question about a
"RESET" button; which I thought was mostly/only specifically related to
AT systems (of which I have an old P166 that's in a BabyAT case).
Everything after - I thought was _ATX_.

Basically, my understanding is: The AT systems had/have Full power(120v
AC) running to the actual On/Off switch (which caused many a zapper for
some - and allows for a RESET front panel button [and "turbo" mode
:-]), and the Mobo could (potentially and literally) blowup in your
face, if one forgot to discharge the capacitors, and/or unplug the
power -- which is why ATX was introduced. (I'm sure there are other
reasons too, that I can't recall ATM).

Dragging that "low" for <mumble> clock cycles
resets all hardware to a known state. The three-finger-salute on the
other hand, just generates a signal to the operating system ALONE to start
running some piece of code

I have always understood this to mean a *soft* or *warm* boot (as
opposed to a *cold* boot, - since also the RAM doesn't necessarily get
discharged (or checked) upon a restart ('shutdown -r now' , or through
the GUI).

(in windoze, this used to cause it to restart
the software - in Linux, look in /etc/inittab to see what your system is
configured to do), but it does exactly nothing to the hardware.

Understood and agreed ;-) - it's a Keyboard assigned Interrupt signal
(AFAICT)

Also, if
the operating system is out in la-la land somewhere and not reading the
keyboard, the three-finger-salute isn't even seen, never mind acted upon.

which is why when a system *hangs*, this ctrl+alt+del keycode usually
does squat anyway.

The ZeroConf address would come up in windoze if it thinks it loaded the
device driver OK (meaning only that no error messages were received while
loading the driver),

I get _no_ errors when chainloading Winblows (win98) through GRUB - but
it 'does' take a little time after my autoexec.bat file loads - it sits
at the text/boot screen showing C:\DOSKey /insert (I can see all
onscreen bootup messages for any OS, even though I may have a "buggy"
BIOS)...and all my silly BIOS's 'quick/fast/silent boot' options are
set to off.

Another piece of possible relevant info;
I've totally disabled NetBIOS in win98 (those nasty 135-139 ports),
something akin to this <http://www.grc.com/su-rebinding9x.htm>

In your case, this is _somewhat_ similar to the O/P (although you seem to
have a different NIC), in that the one operating system is leaving the
hardware in a mode that the other operating system doesn't recognize, or
doesn't know how to correct.

I think so too - precisely.

* WakeOnLan connection from NIC to Mobo is 'connected', though I don't
use it.

I don't _think_ it's relevant - if it were, I'd expect either no, or
constant booting problems

hmm...I'll have to also delve deeper into that as an issue - I say so;
b/c one Debian installation (awhile back, and on the /same/ HD as
win98) freaked out on me while the machine was totally Off , except for
the WOL - the NIC light always stays On (awaiting instructions) even
after a Clean and Full power shutdown.

What eventually happened was;
I was shutdown completely (except for that WOL I guess) and after a day
of being away, I booted up (into GRUB, then chose Debian) and could not
get passed a certain point in the text bootup messages (I can't recall
/exactly/ where it hung, but everything I tried seemed to make it
worse) . Finally I couldn't even use the Debian install, and used only
98 for awhile, while I was trying to sort through the Debian issues and
tryingto recover. It's a very long process/story that ended me back
into re-installing Both OSes...(Details left out, for brevity in this
thread).

100b National Semiconductor Corporation
0020 DP83815 (MacPhyter) Ethernet Controller
103c 0024 Pavilion ze4400 builtin Network
1385 f311 FA311 / FA312 (FA311 with WoL HW)

OK, I think. My notes suggest that's a 'natsemi' driver.

Right you are;
~$ dmesg | grep -i natsemi
natsemi dp8381x driver, version 1.07+LK1.0.17, Sep 27, 2002
http://www.scyld.com/network/natsemi.html
natsemi 0000:00:0e.0: EEPROM did not reload in 20000 usec.
natsemi eth0: NatSemi DP8381[56] at 0xcc82b000 (0000:00:0e.0),
00:09:5b:8d:10:f5, IRQ 11, port TP.

I still have trouble using commands (and it's options) such as
'modprobe' and 'depmod' to find out more useful info about which
modules are loaded, being used, their dependencies, etc.

FWIW..I have a plain vanilla Kernel installed using initrd(?) and the
cramfs - I only say this , in case some funky module parsing commands
are being told to me

~$ dmesg | grep -i init
checking if image is initramfs...it isn't (ungzip failed); looks like
an initrd
Freeing initrd memory: 4216k freed
Initializing Cryptographic API
RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 8192K size 1024 blocksize

~$ dmesg | grep -i cram
RAMDISK: cramfs filesystem found at block 0
VFS: Mounted root (cramfs filesystem) readonly.

IOW - there's nothing in /usr/src/linux - there's not even a /linux
subDIR in there.

~$ cat /boot/grub/menu.lst
[...]
title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.8-2-386
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8-2-386 root=/dev/hdc1 ro acpi=force
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.8-2-386
savedefault
boot
[...]

~$ cat /etc/fstab
[...]
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0
1
[...]

* ACPI is active (via 'acpi=force' in GRUB Kernel command line) on this

Can't help there.

Okee dokey ;-)

I've uninstalled the AppleTalk Services(?) a couple months back --

That's a disadvantage of some of these overly helpful installation
programs. If I wanted support for Apple (or Novell, or Samba, or...), I'd
have told you. Stop being so helpful!! Hack! Smash! Grrr...

I hear that - ....you sure as heck said it! -- even though to be fair,
I must confess that I'd most certainly munge an install if I had use
'expert26' mode to choose each and every item, dependency and set every
parameter - I mean (just on the area of Fonts alone) there was a slew
of questions relating to using a certain Font Server, whether or not I
wanted Pongo(?), (Pango?) to handle this or not...something like that -
and that was just the Fonts section of the Install.

My newness to *nix systems has me a bit all over the place - and
uncertain about certain commands, their options, (and mild scripting)
to help find (only the relevant) info buried deep within log files and
for debugging - heck, I haven't even yet figured out how to use the
'Find' command properly yet :-/ ...and 'mount' and 'umount' have me
pulling hair on occasion.

But it's posts from people, such as yourself and others, that when they
post a 'command' - I try to follow along and learn (and go as far as
looking up the 'man' pages , and issuing the command myself, depending
upon what the thread's subject is about) - and that's why I always post
the 'command' + the 'output' - so that others (newbs perhaps) can gain
from it hopefully.

Some things I know well, and other things I know nothing about - that's
how I like(need to) learn, ...so I 'retain' it, and if I use it
constantly - it sticks with me most times. Plus there are many other
areas (other than PCs/Computers) of my life that require my focus and
attention.

I'm not the young man I once was, and while I'm not elderly either -
memory retention (or more correctly, the lack thereof) is just one of
those things that creeps up on you with age.

We've had more than one user who attempted
to log in as his password, and then enter his username when prompted for the
secret word (invariably, some real wiz from Mahogany Row). Sigh...

ouch...
As long as I can actually 'get' to the info, I'm very much ok with
tight security, and actually am trying to learn more about it, use it,
enforce it correctly. I am *king* of my domain (though I won't logon as
root, unless necessary to perform a task, and I have sudo
(/etc/sudoers) setup to cooperate nicely. I guess it's mostly Groups,
and User permissions and such I need to really learn more about - and
not so much the 9-10 digit attributes POSIX stuff, but the Group
'number' assignments and such - nevermind that for now - sorry
[/rambling on]

I need to learn how to tell those darn serfs to do what I want them to
do ;-)

$ sudo gzip -dc syslog.5.gz | less

That will do the trick.

thank you kindly

So...
because my problem is the opposite, I wouldn't think this would be
useful to me(?) since it's winblows that has this 169.254.x.x addy
*after* being booted into Debian.

It could still be something similar - point is, how do you induce the
failure mode.

It doesn't seem to matter whether it's a warm boot (reboot) or a cold
boot

I have only one system that dual boots (Slackware and
Red Hat), and I can not get '/sbin/shutdown -r now' to cleanly restart
the system. I must use '/sbin/shutdown -h now' and then poke the reset
button after the system reports "System Halted"

This is extremely close to the way my system behaves when using a
Knoppix 3.6 LiveCD - it never entirely/fully shuts down, no matter what
I do..I have to usually drop to root and type 'shutdown -r now' to
reboot into win98 or Debian and then shutdown. All the Hard Disks and
Opticals get their power cut and most everything else appears off, but
I can still hear the system running (PSU fan), and other items are not
powered off in this state.

- which is a lie anyway
as I can still ping the "halted" box (though I can't connect to any
other network services). If I don't do this (reset), the system gets
lost during the subsequent reboot, and wedges solid.

Exactly - ...BTW is that an AT system or ATX ?

I wonder how much the Client for MS Networking (win98) munges the
settings.

I dunno - the snippet from Becker was responding to someone with that
problem in win98.

My NetBIOS settings (the lack of) or protocol (kind of, though not
really a protocol) in combo with my WOL/WOR options have made this
system real funky, I think. Heck, it may be a hardware issue after all
(well, atleast maybe the way PME settings, ACPI, WOL, and the OS
software and BIOS interact).

QUICK, [snip]

haha ;-)

Not a problem. You changed the subject line, so if the O/P responds to
my original response or your response over in c.o.l.h, the subject line
will tell things apart - not that it really matters, as the problems are
related.

Got it - and thanks, for both the help -and- the conversation.

Regards

.