HDAMA + FILO

[Craig C. Forney]

I was able to get FILO up as a PAYLOAD for Linuxbios in a very short
time.  And it was able to load and start executing either memtest86 or
the Linux kernel off of an IDE disk using GRUB.

Unfortunately when Linux is booting up and attempts to mount the root
file system, it chokes complaining that it can't mount the root device
(the entry is fine, and linux reports the root device properly as it
tries to mount it).

When I stick back in the stock Phoenix BIOS, the same disk/kernel boots
up just fine and has no problems whatsoever mounting the root device.

I suspect that maybe FILO has done something naughty to the IDE
registers, as I think the root mount is the first work the kernel is
doing on the disk.  The kernel can see the CDROM (as well as all the
other non-IDE devices).

Anybody have any ideas on this?

Craig C. Forney
Opus Innovations LLC

[SONE Takeshi]

On Fri, Oct 10, 2003 at 02:13:00AM -0700, Craig C. Forney wrote:
> I suspect that maybe FILO has done something naughty to the IDE
> registers,

I think the IDE driver that FILO uses does only very basic operation
to the IDE.

However LinuxBIOS might set up the IDE controller as different way
than Phoenix.

Could you use Etherboot as payload, and do a network boot (not IDE
boot, it uses almost same driver) to see what happen?
> as I think the root mount is the first work the kernel is
> doing on the disk.  The kernel can see the CDROM (as well as all the
> other non-IDE devices).

Partion table is the first thing the kernel reads from disk.
Does it go well?
> Anybody have any ideas on this?

Also, if you were using /vmlinuz, try ELF boot instead (convert your kernel
with mkelfImage from LNXI).
bzImage loader could have bugs.

[Stefan Reinauer]

* Craig C. Forney  [031010 11:13]:
> Unfortunately when Linux is booting up and attempts to mount the root
> file system, it chokes complaining that it can't mount the root device
> (the entry is fine, and linux reports the root device properly as it
> tries to mount it).

Are you using an initial ramdisk to load the rootfs driver or fs when 
booting with grub?

Stefan

[ron minnich]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2003, Craig C. Forney wrote:
> Unfortunately when Linux is booting up and attempts to mount the root
> file system, it chokes complaining that it can't mount the root device
> (the entry is fine, and linux reports the root device properly as it
> tries to mount it).

can you send the messages. We used to have this type of problem, and it 
was almost always partitioning issues or block numbering issues. Linux 
acts a little differently when there is no BIOS information describing the 
drive.
> I suspect that maybe FILO has done something naughty to the IDE
> registers, as I think the root mount is the first work the kernel is
> doing on the disk.

dubious. I'm pretty sure that's not it.

ron