"Derek Lieber": "trouble booting 0.11 (continued)" (Jan 12, 14:39):
quoted text
> I just tried using version 0.10 of "bootimage" to run version 0.11
> of "rootimage". The system comes up fine. I can access the harddisk ok,
> for example by running "cp /dev/hd0 /dev/null".
> 
> But when running "fdisk", I get:
> 
> /dev/hd1: ..stuff about partition 1...
> /dev/hd2: ..stuff about partition 2...
> /dev/hd3: ..stuff about partition 3...
> harddisk I/O error
> dev 0305 block 0
> 
> and the program terminates. Now device 0305 is /dev/hd5 (ie. 2nd harddisk),
> but I don't have a 2nd harddisk. Does linux for some reason expect TWO
> harddisks? Is this the reason I'm unable to boot version 0.11 of the
> kernel (as described in my previous message)?

No, this is totally normal: the kernel tries to read from the second
harddisk, and fails.  No problem.  The reason that 0.10 works, but 0.11
doesn't, is that I changed 0.11 so that it does a hd-reset at bootup,
mostly to test the code.  Ok it wasn't so great an idea, but it showed
up the bug in the reset-code.

If you can get linux up and running on some machine (0.10 works, but has
bugs, so 0.11 is better), you can make a new 0.11 that works somewhat
just by changing the line

static int reset = 1;

to

static int reset = 0;

at the head of hd.c, and recompiling the kernel.  This works, but
ignores the deeper problem of not being able to reset the disk.  I still
think you'd better wait for 0.12: it's ready, but I want to test
everything out for a bit yet.  I was still adding things to it
yesterday, now I'm just playing around, and trying to see if 0.12 fails.

		Linus

PS. Ignore my warning about bugs in bash-1.10: bash 1.11 came out
yesterday (the day before?), and was very easy to port to linux. I
haven't found any bugs yet.