From: Alfie Costa (agcosta@gis.net)
Date: Tue Feb 15 2000 - 14:29:12 CET
It was three short months ago, On 17 Nov 99, at 20:50, when winsor
<mulinux@sunsite.auc.dk> wrote:
> As I've said earlier I've had problems creating Mulinux disks on several
> of my machines here, But I think I might have cured this (at least for
> me). Instead of booting from a Hard disk (even command prompt only)I tried
> booting from a "win95 startup disk".....and the Mulinux disk creation
> seems to work fine whereas before I received kernel panic messages
> pretaining to mounting the vfs along with a bunch of cryptic error
> messages and codes.
The other day I was installing mu on an old 486 and had the same problem. In
my case the 486 gave the kernel panic message and said it couldn't find the
disk, then halted. An interesting detail in this instance was that the A:
drive lights would go on, stop, and during the panic, the B: drive lights would
go on. mu seemed to be looking on B: instead of A:.
It turns out the problem was a BIOS setting. The BIOS in question had a handy
feature that lets you swap drive letters. This 486 had two floppies, a 3" and
a 5", and 3" was B: and 5" was A:. Which drive was which depended on how the
disk drive cable was arranged. With the BIOS setting though, the 3" was A:,
and the 5" B:. This would be handy if you had a 3" DOS boot disk; using the
BIOS there's no need to open the case to wrestle with the drive cable.
Hope that makes sense, because that's how the 486 in question was. The BIOS
loaded the kernel from the 3" drive, then the kernel loaded its own floppy
drive code, which replaced the BIOS floppy drive code. The kernel doesn't know
about the software switcheroo the BIOS was doing, and looked on the hardware 5"
A: drive, which for all practical MsDos-purposes seemed to be the B: drive.
Not to Linux though; there was no disk there, so the kernel couldn't find
anything.
Solution: opened the box, switched the cabling, and mu installed with no
complaint.
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