[ltp] Re: Installing problems on X22

[Tod Harter]

On Monday 17 December 2001 04:57, you wrote:
> On Mon, 2001-12-17 at 09:41, Michael Nordmeyer wrote:
> > On Sunday 16 December 2001 16:17, Ross Burton wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I've just tried to install Debian onto my X22 laptop.  I booted the
> > > CD but the kernel hangs on "md driver...".  Does anyone know how to
> > > get around this?  I could install RH72 which LinuxCare say installs
> > > fine, but I'd rather stick with Debian.

"md" is "multiple disk" which is the software RAID driver. In order to cater 
to as wide an audience as possible distros have taken to including support 
for it in the kernel (so that you could boot off a stripped root partition 
for instance). Unfortunately it has been known to hang a few systems on boot 
:(.
> >
> > I've read on the list that it's possible to boot with a different
> > debian CD. It seems there're different boot kernels on different debian
> > CDs.

Its pretty easy to make your own boot disk. You just need a working linux and 
the kernel source code. Generally it doesn't matter TOO much what kernel you 
install from (though it should support your hardware hopefully...). You can 
just take an existing boot floppy, build a new kernel, and copy it over the 
kernel image thats on the boot floppy now. It should generally work fine. you 
might need to tell it to mount the cdrom as its root partition, but you can 
use the bootparam program to do that after you compile the kernel. Do a "man 
bootparam" it tells you a lot of interesting stuff about kernel 
initialization.
> >
> > Alternatively you can try to use different boot disks. There're some
> > unofficial boot disks floating around with reiserfs or ext3 support for
> > example.
>
> I'll probably try and find XFS boot disks, as I would like to use XFS on
> the laptop.  Thanks.

XFS is a great file system under Irix. Maybe the best Unix file system ever, 
but Reiserfs is better supported and has more of a track record in Linux. I 
highly recommend it as a general replacement for ext2. 
>
> > IIRC the md driver is for logical volumes or raid. May be the recovery
> > partition caused the md driver to hang.
>
> I copied it to my desktop and used Partition Magic to re-arrange the
> disk, its not 50/50 FAT32/ext2.  Interesting...
>
> Ross

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