path: root/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/installation/common/trouble.sgml

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	This file contains the comments of the old TROUBLE.TXT file.
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<sect1 id="trouble">
  <title>Troubleshooting</title>

  <sect2 id="repairing">
    <title>Repairing an Existing &os; Installation</title>

    <para>&os; features a
    <quote>Fixit</quote> option in the top menu of the boot floppy.
    To use it, you will also need either a
    <filename>fixit.flp</filename> image floppy, generated in the same
    fashion as the boot floppy, or the <quote>live filesystem</quote>
    CDROM; typically the second CDROM in a multi-disc &os; 
    distribution.</para>

    <para>To invoke fixit, simply boot the
    <filename>kern.flp</filename> floppy, choose the
    <quote>Fixit</quote> item and insert the fixit floppy or CDROM
    when asked.  You will then be placed into a shell with a wide
    variety of commands available (in the <filename>/stand</filename>
    and <filename>/mnt2/stand</filename> directories) for checking,
    repairing and examining filesystems and their contents.  Some
    UNIX administration experience <emphasis>is</emphasis> required to
    use the fixit option.</para>
  </sect2>

  <sect2>
    <title>Common Installation Problems for &arch.print; Architecture Users</title>

    <qandaset arch="i386">
      <qandaentry>
        <question>
          <para>I go to boot from the hard disk for the first time
          after installing &os;, the kernel loads and probes my
          hardware, but stops with messages like:</para>

          <screen>changing root device to wd1s1a panic: cannot mount root</screen>
          <para>What is wrong?  What can I do?</para>

          <para>What is this
          <literal>bios_drive:interface(unit,partition)kernel_name</literal>
          thing that is displayed with the boot help?</para>
        </question>
        <answer>
          <para>There is a longstanding problem in the case where the
          boot disk is not the first disk in the system.  The BIOS
          uses a different numbering scheme to &os;, and working
          out which numbers correspond to which is difficult to get
          right.</para>

          <para>In the case where the boot disk is not the first disk
          in the system, &os; can need some help finding it.  There
          are two common situations here, and in both of these cases,
          you need to tell &os; where the root filesystem is.  You
          do this by specifying the BIOS disk number, the disk type
          and the &os; disk number for that type.</para>

          <para>The first situation is where you have two IDE disks,
          each configured as the master on their respective IDE
          busses, and wish to boot &os; from the second disk.  The
          BIOS sees these as disk 0 and disk 1, while &os; sees
          them as <devicename>ad0</devicename> and
          <devicename>ad2</devicename>.</para>

          <para>&os; is on BIOS disk 1, of type
          <literal>ad</literal> and the &os; disk number is 2, so
          you would say:</para>

          <screen><userinput>1:ad(2,a)kernel</userinput></screen>

          <para>Note that if you have a slave on the primary bus, the
          above is not necessary (and is effectively wrong).</para>

          <para>The second situation involves booting from a SCSI disk
          when you have one or more IDE disks in the system.  In this
          case, the &os; disk number is lower than the BIOS disk
          number.  If you have two IDE disks as well as the SCSI disk,
          the SCSI disk is BIOS disk 2, type <literal>da</literal> and
          &os; disk number 0, so you would say:</para>

          <screen><userinput>2:da(0,a)kernel</userinput></screen>

          <para>To tell &os; that you want to boot from BIOS disk
          2, which is the first SCSI disk in the system.  If you only
          had one IDE disk, you would use '1:' instead.</para>

          <para>Once you have determined the correct values to use,
          you can put the command exactly as you would have typed it
          in the <filename>/boot.config</filename> file using a
          standard text editor.  Unless instructed otherwise, &os;
          will use the contents of this file as the default response
          to the <literal>boot:</literal> prompt.</para>
        </answer>
      </qandaentry>
      <qandaentry>
        <question>
	  <para>I go to boot from the hard disk for the first time
          after installing &os;, but the Boot Manager prompt just
          prints <literal>F?</literal> at the boot menu each time but
          the boot won't go any further.</para>
	</question>
	<answer>
          <para>The hard disk geometry was set incorrectly in the
          Partition editor when you installed &os;.  Go back into
          the partition editor and specify the actual geometry of your
          hard disk.  You must reinstall &os; again from the
          beginning with the correct geometry.</para>

          <para>If you are failing entirely in figuring out the
	  correct geometry for your machine, here's a tip: Install a
	  small DOS partition at the beginning of the disk and install
	  &os; after that.  The install program will see the DOS
	  partition and try to infer the correct geometry from it,
	  which usually works.</para>

	  <para>The following tip is no longer recommended, but is left here
	  for reference:</para>

	  <blockquote>
            <para>If you are setting up a truly dedicated &os;
	    server or workstation where you don't care for (future)
	    compatibility with DOS, Linux or another operating system,
	    you've also got the option to use the entire disk (`A' in
	    the partition editor), selecting the non-standard option
	    where &os; occupies the entire disk from the very first
	    to the very last sector.  This will leave all geometry
	    considerations aside, but is somewhat limiting unless
	    you're never going to run anything other than &os; on a
	    disk.</para>
	  </blockquote>
 	</answer>
      </qandaentry>
      <qandaentry>
        <question>
	  <para>The &man.mcd.4; driver keeps thinking that it has
	  found a device and this stops my Intel EtherExpress card
	  from working.</para>
	</question>
	<answer>
	  <para>Use the UserConfig utility (see
          <filename>HARDWARE.TXT</filename>) and disable the probing
          of the <devicename>mcd0</devicename> and
          <devicename>mcd1</devicename> devices.  Generally speaking,
          you should only leave the devices that you will be using
          enabled in your kernel.</para>
	</answer>
      </qandaentry>
      <qandaentry>
        <question>
	  <para>The system finds my &man.ed.4; network card, but I
          keep getting device timeout errors.</para>
	</question>
	<answer>
	  <para>Your card is probably on a different IRQ from what is
	  specified in the kernel configuration.  The ed driver does
	  not use the `soft' configuration by default (values entered
	  using EZSETUP in DOS), but it will use the software
	  configuration if you specify <literal>?</literal> in the IRQ field of your
	  kernel config file.</para>

	  <para>Either move the jumper on the card to a hard
          configuration setting (altering the kernel settings if
          necessary), or specify the IRQ as <literal>-1</literal> in UserConfig or <literal>?</literal> 
          in your kernel config file.  This will tell the kernel to
          use the soft configuration.</para>

          <para>Another possibility is that your card is at IRQ 9,
          which is shared by IRQ 2 and frequently a cause of problems
          (especially when you have a VGA card using IRQ 2!).  You
          should not use IRQ 2 or 9 if at all possible.</para>
	</answer>
      </qandaentry>
      <qandaentry>
        <question>
	  <para>I booted the install floppy on my IBM ThinkPad (tm)
          laptop, and the keyboard is all messed up.</para>
	</question>
	<answer>
          <para>Older IBM laptops use a non-standard keyboard
          controller, so you must tell the keyboard driver (atkbd0) to
          go into a special mode which works on the ThinkPads.  Change
          the atkbd0 'Flags' to 0x4 in UserConfig and it should work
          fine.  (Look in the Input Menu for 'Keyboard'.)</para>
	</answer>
      </qandaentry>
      <qandaentry>
        <question>
	  <para>My system can not find my Intel EtherExpress 16 card.</para>
        </question>
	<answer>
	  <para>You must set your Intel EtherExpress 16 card to be
          memory mapped at address 0xD0000, and set the amount of
          mapped memory to 32K using the Intel supplied
          <filename>softset.exe</filename> program.</para>
	</answer>
      </qandaentry>
      <qandaentry>
        <question>
	  <para>When installing on an EISA HP Netserver, my on-board
	  AIC-7xxx SCSI controller isn't detected.</para>
        </question>
	<answer>
	  <para>This is a known problem, and will hopefully be fixed
	  in the future.  In order to get your system installed at
	  all, boot with the <option>-c</option> option into
	  UserConfig, but <emphasis>don't</emphasis> use the pretty
	  visual mode but the plain old CLI mode.  Type:</para>

          <screen><userinput>eisa 12</userinput>
<userinput>quit</userinput></screen>

          <para>at the prompt.  (Instead of `quit', you might also
          type `visual', and continue the rest of the configuration
          session in visual mode.)  While it's recommended to compile
          a custom kernel, dset now also understands to save
          this value.</para>

          <para>Refer to the FAQ topic 3.16 for an explanation of the
          problem, and for how to continue.  Remember that you can
          find the FAQ on your local system in /usr/share/doc/FAQ,
          provided you have installed the `doc' distribution.</para>
	</answer>
      </qandaentry>
      <qandaentry>
        <question>
	  <para>I have a Panasonic AL-N1 or Rios Chandler Pentium
          machine and I find that the system hangs before ever getting
          into the installation now.</para>
        </question>
	<answer>
	  <para>Your machine doesn't like the new
          <literal>i586_copyout</literal> and
          <literal>i586_copyin</literal> code for some reason.  To
          disable this, boot the installation boot floppy and when it
          comes to the very first menu (the choice to drop into kernel
          UserConfig mode or not) choose the command-line interface
          (<quote>expert mode</quote>) version and type the following
          at it:</para>

          <screen><userinput>flags npx0 1</userinput></screen>

          <para>Then proceed normally to boot.  This will be saved
          into your kernel, so you only need to do it once.</para>
	</answer>
      </qandaentry>
      <qandaentry>
        <question>
	  <para>I have this CMD640 IDE controller that is said to be
	  broken.</para>
        </question>
	<answer>
	  <para>&os; does not support this controller.</para>
	</answer>
      </qandaentry>
      <qandaentry>
        <question>
	  <para>On a Compaq Aero notebook, I get the message <quote>No
          floppy devices found!  Please check ...</quote> when trying to
          install from floppy.</para>
        </question>
	<answer>
	  <para>With Compaq being always a little different from other
          systems, they do not announce their floppy drive in the CMOS
          RAM of an Aero notebook.  Therefore, the floppy disk driver
          assumes there is no drive configured.  Go to the UserConfig
          screen, and set the Flags value of the fdc0 device to 0x1.
          This pretends the existence of the first floppy drive (as a
          1.44 MB drive) to the driver without asking the CMOS at
          all.</para>
	</answer>
      </qandaentry>
      <qandaentry>
        <question>
	  <para>When installing on an Dell Poweredge XE, Dell
          proprietary RAID controller DSA (Dell SCSI Array) isn't
          recognized.</para>
        </question>
	<answer>
	  <para>Configure the DSA to use AHA-1540 emulation using EISA
          configuration utility.  After that &os; detects the DSA
          as an Adaptec AHA-1540 SCSI controller, with irq 11 and port
          340. Under emulation mode system will use DSA RAID disks,
          but you cannot use DSA-specific features such as watching
          RAID health.</para>
	</answer>
      </qandaentry>
      <qandaentry>
        <question>
	  <para>I have an IBM EtherJet PCI card, it is detected by the
          &man.fxp.4; driver correctly, but the lights on the card don't
          come on and it doesn't connect to the network.</para>
        </question>
	<answer>
	  <para>We don't understand why this happens.  Neither do IBM
          (we asked them).  The card is a standard Intel EtherExpress
          Pro/100 with an IBM label on it, and these cards normally
          work just fine.  You may see these symptoms only in some IBM
          Netfinity servers.  The only solution is to install a
          different Ethernet adapter.</para>
	</answer>
      </qandaentry>
      <qandaentry>
        <question>
	  <para>When I configure the network during installation on an
          IBM Netfinity 3500, the system freezes.</para>
        </question>
	<answer>
	  <para>There is a problem with the onboard Ethernet in the
          Netfinity 3500 which we have not been able to identify at
          this time.  It may be related to the SMP features of the
          system being misconfigured.  You will have to install
          another Ethernet adapter and avoid attempting to configure
          the onboard adapter at any time.</para>
	</answer>
      </qandaentry>
      <qandaentry>
        <question>
	  <para>When I install onto a drive managed by a Mylex PCI
          RAID controller, the system fails to boot (eg. with a
          <literal>read error</literal> message).</para>
        </question>
	<answer>
	  <para>There is a bug in the Mylex driver which results in it
          ignoring the <quote>8GB</quote> geometry mode setting in the
          BIOS.  Use the 2GB mode instead.</para>
	</answer>
      </qandaentry>
    </qandaset>
  </sect2>
</sect1>