TwinMOS Mobile disk IV & FC2

[James Wilkinson]

Tor Harald Thorland was having trouble with a USB disk.

I suggested:
> ... booting with acpi=off (at the end of the kernel comand line:
> edit it in grub or in /boot/grub/grub.conf)? I know that it's not really
> a proper solution on a laptop, but it might help you find one.

Tor replied:
> Yes, Its getting further... I can now mount /dev/sda1 to /mnt/flash (or
> wathever) when I have the ACPI=off.

Hooray. You have nailed down the problem to the ACPI subsystem.

> I tryed to make the ACPI=noirq. Then the I rebooted, and the computer
> hang, right after the graphical boot said: setting hostname (or
> something.. I have norwegian text on it) Also the my usb mouse dident
> work during this startup (it normaly does work).

Hmm. I suspect we can get the USB mouse to work later.

What happens if you turn off quiet and rhgb in the kernel command line
(the same place you put the acpi=noirq)? It will still hang, we just
might get to see what's causing the hanging.

> I also has a Apacer handy steno 1.1 256mb disk, i was also able to make
> this work with the ACPI=off. The only thing here is that the Apacer
> stick is /dev/sda, even if only this stick is in the usb port.
> 
> Why does 1 of them use /dev/sda, when the other comes in as /dev/sda1 ?

Manufacturer differences. Some put a partition table on their USB disks,
as though they are hard disks, and you get sda1. Others don't, as though
the disks are floppies or CDs, and you get sda.

Persons with sufficient spare time may experiment with partitioning CDs
and not partitioning hard disks. The end results should work in Unix-
based systems, but the rest of the world will probably get horribly
confused.

> Also, how can I disable the graphical boot to see wats going on when the
> hangs during the boot?

That's the removing rhgb I was talking about earlier.

> James was also earlyer talking about maby making a bugzilla entry about
> this.. Is this problem something to add to bugzilla, and if so.. how?

Yes please.

Visit bugzilla.redhat.com, specify the kernel as the component cauing
you grief.

One other thing to consider: I don't know if your laptop supports APM,
the older equivalent. You might investigate turning ACPI off
permanently, which should enable APM. You'd then have to configure the
laptop to use APM to do laptop-style stuff like power management and
suspend. I can't really help you there.

James.

-- 
E-mail address: james | ... in our completely unscientific usability study,
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | it took our subjects less than 10 seconds to locate
                      | the Solitaire game. We're not sure what else the
                      | corporate desktop needs. -- Michael Hall, Serverwatch