Binary package hint: grub2
Hi,
I'm having problems installing Lucid server i386 on an older Compaq server.
This is a Prosignia 300 (Pentium 150, 208MB, both PCI and EISA bus. 2 hdd's and 1 cd, all scsi.
Yes, that is a bit antique but it's always been very reliable for me :-)
Up until now it has been doing fine for years on RedHat Shrike and Lilo, but I thought it was time to try something new with it.
These older Compaqs (Prosignias and Proliants) are known for having a quirky bios. The bios does count 212992 KB at cold boot, but seems to report only 15M or 16M on occasions. I had to boot it with 'append mem=192M' in Lilo with RH.
Install from the Lucid Server CD went easy, after I found out that I had to specify 'memmap=192M@16M' in order for the CD to boot without a kernel panic.
First I set it up with a simple partitioning of / ext4 on sda1 (hd0,1) and swap on sda2 (hd0,5). After rebooting I got
- no grub menu (because only one OS present I learned later)
- error: you need to load the kernel first. press any key to continue
That was it.
Booted from CD again, went into rescue mode and learned a lot about grub.cfg and installing things from the CLI (like in the days when...). That did not fix it.
I changed some memory settings in the bios (booting from floppies for the config utils every time), but no luck. The 'memory hole' option is not there.
Then I messed up dpkg when the CD did a re-install of the base system, so I decided to do a new fresh install.
This time I chose a different setup, with /boot on sda1 (hd0,1) ext3, / on sda3 (hd0,3) ext4 and swap on sda5 (hd0,5). Also I found that the system boots equally well from CD with 'memmap=207M@1M'.
Installation went fine, but I still could not boot. So I downgraded to grub1 (possible because of the separate /boot on ext3), but no joy from that either.
Upgraded it to the latest version of grub2 again, installed in the mbr of sda (hd0) and checked grub.cfg very carefully. No strange things, but still not loading the kernel.
By now I did manage to get into the grub menu, so I could try some more settings easily. Learning every day, eh...
The error 'you need to load the kernel first' appeared to come from trying to load initrd after loading the kernel failed.
Manually changing the boot options gave me another error:
'Booting a command list. Error: cannot allocate real mode pages. Press any key' etc...
So indeed not loading the kernel and thus not initrd either.
Tried different numbers in the memmap argument (192M@16M or 207M@1M), but no luck.
Removed splash and quiet, but no luck.
Removed the 'search' line altogether, but no luck.
Tried linux16, which gave me 'error: too small lower memory (0x9910 > 0x0)' and that is the same error comes up when choosing memtest.
I'm running out of ideas now. This seems to be a bug in the way grub handles memory (detecting, allocating or both) when loading the kernel. Booting from CD works just fine with the memmap line, running kernel 2.6.32-10-generic, so it is quite possible to run this modern software on my older server.
I did not try installing Lilo yet, because I like to use the same setup as I do on my other machines and because I feel grub is the way to go.
I will give it another go tomorrow, and come back to post the output of dmesg (floppy would not mount for me) and the config file produced by the bios config utility. Don't you just love eisa config? :-)
Maybe there is a way of informing grub where and how to find the right memory, but I did not find the documentation for that (yet). The whole memmap thing is something of a hit-and-miss thing for me so far. It's 15 years or more since I was loading modules in high memory by hand using hex in the DOS-days.
This is probably a rare bug or just an incompatibility with a not quite standard bios. Still, I'd like my machine to work with grub and it might very well be a true bug that can also hurt other systems sometime.
If you have any suggestions or things I should do to help find the cause, please let me know.
Keep up the good work.
cheers
Tom
system bios config file