Hi,

I have a Raq 3 with 550 OS, 120 GB HDD and 512 MB RAM.

I installed all Sun updates and since Sun kernel updates are for i686 I
installed Nuance's i386 ones and after the first one (C9) I could not
boot anymore from disk. I connected a null modem cable and found
out that the ROM boot works just fine but the second kernel (disk) stalls
when checking the partitions.

I doubt it just takes time for my 120 GB HDD, since I could install all
other updates and reboot it many times. I booted from ROM and installed
all Nuance kernels up to C13 and then Cobaltsupport.com's C14,
but still, the same issue.

These kernels worked for the same machine using a 8 GB HDD yesterday
so it really must be the new drive I got today. I purchased a Seagate 7200.7,
7200 RPM, 8MB - 120 GB.

Any of you know a way to fix this issue? Booting from ROM with that
old kernel doesn't seem too secure..


Console output
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
ALI15X3: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 78
ALI15X3: chipset revision 193
ALI15X3: 100% native mode on irq 14
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xff30-0xff37, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xff38-0xff3f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA
hda: ST3120026A, SN=5JS4ATZF, FWREV=8.54, ATA DISK drive
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
ide0 at 0xff58-0xff5f,0xff56 on irq 14
hda: 234441648 sectors (120034 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=14593/255/63, UDMA(33)
Partition check:
hda:

I found the problem from The Cobalt Hacking FAQ:

Q: My Cobalt hangs at "Partition check:". Why is this?
A: The only known cause of this is an alignment of couple things. Firstly,
you put LBA48 capable disks into your Cobalt (e.g. ATA133). Secondly,
you are trying to boot a 2.4.19 kernel. The 2.4.19 kernel was the first
kernel to introduce LBA48 support. However, it did not handle the case
of an LBA48 disk on an LBA24 controller (such as in Cobalts) very well.
The result is that the kernel is trying to send LBA48 messages to the
disk, but not getting any reply, and hanging when it tries to read the
disk. You can either use LBA24 (e.g. ATA100) disks, or you can revert to
a kernel before 2.4.19, or you can get a kernel newer than 2.4.19, if one
is available.

Let's hope someone release 2.4.20..

Hi,
I have been sucessful in patching the 2.4.19 kernel to work with LBA48 drives.

See http://www.cobaltsupport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=65

Chris De Herrera