Re: Installing Debian Sarge on a Compaq Proliant 1500

From: Michael Heiming (michael+USENET_at_www.heiming.de)
Date: 01/30/05 

Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 13:34:37 +0100

In comp.os.linux.setup Vic Walker <vwalker@innercite.com>:
> Hello, I've been tearing my hair out for weeks trying to install Sarge
> on an old Compaq Proliant 1500, with SCSI drives and an NCR53c8xx based
> SCSI controller. I'm able to boot Sarge from the CD ok, and go through
> the entire installation process. But when I reboot the machine, either
> from Grub or from LILO, I get the following series of messages:

> SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00
> sym53c8xx: at PCI bus 0, device 10, function 0
> sym53c8xx: not initializing, device not supported
> /lib/modules/2.4.27-1-386/kernel/drivers/scsi/sym53c8xx.o: init_module:
> No such device
> /lib/modules/2.4.27-1-386/kernel/drivers/scsi/sym53c8xx.o: insmod
> sym53c8xx failed
> SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00
> Journaled block device driver loaded
> Pivot_root: no such file or directory
> /sbin/init: 426: cannot open dev/console: No such file
> kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!

It looks to me as if the system is successfully loading underlying
scsi modules but fails to load the needed sym53c8xx.o module to
access the root filesystem. Unsure why the system is trying to
load it from the root fs which isn't mounted at this point is
unclear, probably as it can't find the module in initrd?

Presumingly it's simply missing from initrd. Recreate it with the
missing module (man mkinitrd) included and make sure your
boot-loader points to it. After unpacking you can simply mount
(-o loop) an initrd and look at the content, modules are in
./lib.

Good luck

[..] 

-- 
Michael Heiming (X-PGP-Sig > GPG-Key ID: EDD27B94)
mail: echo zvpunry@urvzvat.qr | perl -pe 'y/a-z/n-za-m/'
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