Ok, here's a good one for everyone...

I have a system sitting next to me, with one 13GB IBM HD running off Promise Ultra66 IDE controller (PCI version, not onboard). I also have a 36x CDROM running off the motherboards IDE controller.

The harddrive is detected in Mandrakes 8.0 (and other distros) as HDE (which makes sense).

The CDROM is detected as HDA (also making sense).

Mandrake 8.0 installs fine, I set up a /boot partition, a swap, / partition, and /home, all pretty normal, and the same way I had my Mandrake 7.2 installed.

However, on boot, it 'kernel panic's and cannot boot up the system. Boot disk, same deal. I looked a little more carefully today at the boot info as it whizzed by, and it is grabbing the CDRom as HDA (as it should be), and the hard drive as HDC (which is blatently wrong). So I assume if lilo is trying to boot off HDE, and it can't find it, that it would complain like this. Ok, so this sounds good, but now how do I fix it. I reinstalled, tried to play around with things, but the install is always right, and the boot is always wrong.

Ideas anyone?

I know that some external (pci) ide controllers are difficult. Read about a controller problem on this site before.
Try this tread on promise ultra 100TM
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...p?threadid=620

Well this is why I'm confused. The posts in that thread have problems with RH/SuSe, but mandrake has included support for the Promise cards (and installing off of them) since at least Mandrake 7.0. I'm curious as to why the 2.4.3 kernel in Mandrake 8.0 is detecting it so differently than the 2.2.19 that I was running with, also why the boot image on the cd (which I would assume would also be 2.4.3) seems to grab it correctly...more thoughts?

Don't suppose it could be something as simple as your lilo.conf _trying_ to read from hdc? If you made your boot-disk at install-time, the problem would probably be the same for it.

Just a thought, if you're running Windows, try downloading 'Explore2FS'. This will allow you to 'view' your ext2fx (Linux) partition from within Windows and maybe edit your lilo.conf file so that when you try and boot it looks in the right place.

Obviously, if you're not running Windows, you might like to try attaching your HD to another computer (don't boot from your HD, but from the native one) and edit it from this instead (again, either from within Lin or from within Win with explore2fs).

Good luck.

On the Mandrakeforum, one user was able to distinguish that LM 8's boot image was compiled with a different parameter than the install image. That's why many of of with promise (ultra66 here, PCI) controllers can install Mandrake, but not subsequently run it.

BTW, I had to use the kernel parameter 'ide2=noautotune' to get it to install, but no luck with any parameter in running it.

There are some instructions for recompiling the kernel and setting the correct parameter, but I was unable to compile cleanly so I'm out of luck. From their forum it seems it's not the issue with many hardware problems is not the kernel itself but Mandrake's compiled kernel that is the problem.

Marcus108