Booting up without the IDE CD-ROM fails

[m.roth at 5-cent.us]

Hey, there,

Ata Amiri wrote:
>
> After Installing RHEL3 on a system that has one SATA HDD, from a borrowed

First question: why RHEL3? The current is RHEL 5.5 (I think - we use
CentOS). 3, in fact, is going out of support in a month or two (I know,
becuase we have one person running a 3.x, because he has collaborators
around the world who are running very old stuff, and don't seem to be
willing to upgrade, and I got the email notice a while back).

> IDE CD-ROM, I could boot fine.  As soon as I remove the CD-ROM drive, I
> can't boot the system anymore.  When I reconnect the CD-ROM again, all is
> well.  I have looked at the boot.log, messages, and dmesg to get an
> accurate account of the problem, but I can't recognize anything that points
> to the problem.
<snip>
I think your clues are here:

> PCI: Found IRQ 11 ofr device 00:1f.2
> Ata: 0x11f0 IDE port busy
> Ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x170 ctl 0x376 bmdma 0xF008 irq 15
> ATA: abnormal status 0x7F on port 0x177
> ATA: abnormal status 0x7F on port 0x177
<snip>
> Mounting root filesystem
> Mount: error 6 mounting ext3
> pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot, /sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
> umount /initrd/proc failed: 2
> Freeing unused kernel memory: 164k freed
> Kernel panic: No init found.  Try passing init= option to kernel

Something's wrong on the h/d: it *says* SATA's gagging. Is it bootable?
Did grub or lilo get installed? My first reaction would be to bring up
linux rescue, and fsck -c (check for bad blocks), and let that run
overnight (well, how big's the drive?), then reinstall grub or lilo, then,
last resort, reinstall... and I would absolutely install something five or
six years newer.

         mark