Problem solved

[Dan Murphy]

A while ago, I wrote about a problem a friend of mine was having in the very early stages of installing Linux. Well, he found out what was wrong and I thought I'd relate the experience to this group.

When I first explained the problem, I mentioned that he had a new, second 850MB HDD, that he attached to a GSI controller. He made the bootdisk and rootdisk and booted. When asked to switch diskettes and install the rootdisk, he got either a "Kernel panic" or an I/O error of some sort.

Something I didn't mention in the original description (sorry, didn't know) was that he has a dual floppy drive, i.e. one drive that handles both sizes of diskettes. This was the source of the problem. The jumpers on the drive were set up so that the 3.5" drive was B:, but the GSI controller had it set up as A:, so, while in DOS, the controller was "smart" enough to ignore the jumper setting and work OK with this drive as A:.

When Linux came along, I guess it interrogates the disk drive's setting (ignores the controller??), and the confusion was enough to make Linux barf. I'm not sure why it read the first diskette fine (bootdisk) - heck, maybe it really didn't. But when the jumper setting was set correctly, he was able to finish his installation, and is now a happy camper. He's now battling with X.

Thought you'd be interested. Maybe this is a rookie problem, but, well..... we're  both rookies!


Dan Murphy                 murph at vmark.com
Vmark Software             74260.3322 at compuserve.com
Westboro, MA