this reallly s****cks

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Wed Mar 28, 2007 4:07 pm

I've been trying to get this damn system to start for the last couple of hours now and the debian installer starts and when it comes to the step where it "detects and mounts my cd-rom" it says "cd-rom not detected, cannot mount"

Where do the first steps from the installer run from then?
And knoppix runs fine on this machine.
I was gonna go for a fresh install since I had quite a lot of unnecesary garbage on the other drive but now I don't know ....
The machine is a HP Pavillion M7660, everything sata (both hard drives and both dvd drives)

tried loads of boot options, nothing worked

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Wed Mar 28, 2007 4:34 pm

Sounds like you need to get SATA support enabled in the install kernel some how or another. Just guessing without doing any searching.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Wed Mar 28, 2007 4:50 pm

This is the erro I get and it returns plenty of results in Google, none of the solutions worked so far.
One suggested a bug in the debian installer though, I'm downloading kubuntu 7.04 now and I will try to install that and move from there to a plain debian install afterwards

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Thu Mar 29, 2007 12:38 am

still no luck, kubuntu hangs at

Code: Select all

ATA 1.00: failed to set xfermode (err_mask=0x4)

Gonna google that and try and see what I can come up with.
I will also try other distros but I sure hope I don't have to switch to another distro to be able to use that pc with my os of choice!!!

I'll keep you posted on the developments.

EDIT:
found a thread on Linux forums which linked to a page with custom builds of the debian installer using a more recent kernel.
If what I'm reading is right, support for Core2Duo cpu's started more or less with 2.6.19 and I'm not sure which kernel is used in the latest netinstall image
Here's the page with the custom builds

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Thu Mar 29, 2007 5:29 am

Also found this which might be of interest

No CD-ROM? Are you joking? How the hell did this installer run in the first place? I tried manually selecting one, but nothing was detected this way. It kindly suggested that I abort the installation. Later on I discovered this happened on machines who happened to have windows installed on the primary partition of a SATA drive.

Remember that one of the errors I got was "No common cdrom was detected"
and I also asked myself how the installer started in the first place if the cdrom wasn't working.
Here's the link to the site

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Thu Mar 29, 2007 5:35 am

And just to be on the safe side:
The machine has 2 250GB Seagate sata drives and when I checked the BIOS settings, there were 3 options under Sata:
IDE
RAID
AHCI

The default setting was RAID, but I don't want nor need a RAID setup so I changed it to the setting that made the most sense to me, IDE
AHCI on the other hand, I have no clue about what it is or what it does, apparently it has implications on RAID too.
IDE would be the setting I need for my drives, right?

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 3:01 pm

Turns out the solution was a combination of the last two options I found.
The first being the custom sarge netinstall iso with 2.6.20 kernel, including support for the Intel 965 chipset and various sata devices.
But that wasn't enough, it still wasn't working until I wiped out the windows partition that was polluting the new machine.
Once I deleted the partition with knoppix the installer took off and I'm now apt-get dsit-upgrading to testing, had to use the custom image though, the "normal" netinstall iso didn't cut it.

What really bugs me here is that I was unable to install debian due to the presence of winblows on the drive .....
Once the Redmond fanbase was gone the installer detected my dvd rom properly!

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 3:26 pm

Sounds to me like something funky with the layout of the Microsoft Partition table and possibly combined with some MS specific BIOS funkiness? It would be interested to find out *exactly* what the issue was there.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Sat Mar 31, 2007 11:27 am

Bios funkiness, I don't know.
I checked everything and apart from the Sata settings there's nothing in there I never saw before.
And since I wiped everything clean I wouldn't know how to check for the original layout of the partition table.

But my woes are not over, I can't seem to get the base system installed correctly with the custom image, I can't get my mouse to be recognized and the usb ports on the back of the pc stop working, if I boot into knoppix everyting works like a charm.

I'm getting so close to wrapping this machine back up, get my money back and order a Dell, I tell you ....

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Sat Mar 31, 2007 12:45 pm

That's why I like building my own (after researching all the hardware of course).

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Sun Apr 01, 2007 6:45 am

Ok, I'm finally up and running (almost) thanks to Sidux which is an installable live cd based on debian unstable and which uses a 2.6.20 kernel.
Installation was pretty painless except for the installation of my Geforce 7900GT which refused to work with the live cd - I couldn't perform the installation.
So I ha d to plug another card into the box, perform the installation and then swap the cards to use the new 7900GT.

And now I can't change the refresh rate of the monitor at all, it's stuck at 50Hz and whatever I do I can't get the 85Hz I always had until now with plain debian.
Any ideas? All I succeeded in doing until now is a black screen when I change anything in xorg.conf ... and 50Hz is just not good for my eyes, I can feel that!

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Sun Apr 01, 2007 9:57 am

Are you using the proprietary nVidia driver? What make/model is your monitor?

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Sun Apr 01, 2007 3:25 pm

Actually I completely hosed my system and had to reinstall

Previously I used a script (provided by the sidux guys which fetches the deb packages needed for the nvidia driver to get installed and then installs them.
Now I downloaded the latest nvidia drivers and installed them like I always did, with the included drawback that I have to reinstall them every time xorg gets an update (which can be quite soon in "unstable")

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Sun Apr 01, 2007 3:38 pm

Ice9 wrote: with the included drawback that I have to reinstall them every time xorg gets an update (which can be quite soon in "unstable")

That's why I add this to the "Hold" section of my apt.conf:

Code: Select all

"^xorg-x11-server";

That way it doesn't automatically update my X server every time I update my system. That's probably not the same package name for Debian so change it accordingly.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Sun Apr 01, 2007 5:37 pm

I always "pinned" the packages in synaptic, but still, every once in a while a package relying on some opengl library would eventually get updated with all the consequences for opengl games and stuff.

That's why I wanted to try and install the driver maintained within the repositories, so it would be updated together with all the rest.