Booting up without the IDE CD-ROM fails

[Ata Amiri]

Hello:

 

After Installing RHEL3 on a system that has one SATA HDD, from a borrowed
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. 

 

I think when the CD-ROM is removed, the system looks at the wrong (device,
partition) to boot from - should look for "sda", but looks for "hda" instead
?

 

I am using an Intel 865G motherboard - when I reboot, I get a message from
Kudzu regarding the Ide Interface Controller: "Intel |82801EB Ultra ATA
Stroage Controller has been removed".  I have tried "remove", "configure",
"igore".  no difference. This controller, allows for PATA/SATA devices to
co-exist.  Does that confuse Linux?

 

Things I have tried:

 

I have configured BIOS, where the IDE assignments can be selected:

When On-Chip IDE Devices setting is set to "AUTO", boots up ok, but when the
CD-ROM is disconnected, boot fails.

When On-Chip IDE Devices setting is set to "SATA Only", w or w/o CD-ROM
connected, boot fails.

 

The grub.conf is as follows.  (I have tried passing some kernel variables as
suggested in online forums, none has helped):

Title Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS (2.4.21-4.EL)

            Root (hd0,0)

            Kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.21-4.EL ro root=LABEL=/

            Initrd /initrd-2.4.21-4.EL.img

 

Here is the bottom portion of the boot messages:

 

Loading libata.o module

Loading ata_piix.o module

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

Ata1: thread exiting

Scsi0: ata_piix

Starting timer: 0 0

Loading jbd.o module

Journalled Block Device driver loaded

Loading ext3.o

Mounting /proc filesystem

Creating block devices

Creating root device

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

 

I appreciate any help.

 

Thanks,

Ata