RAQ Boot FAQ
From Parvi - Open source software and patches
My Cobalt hangs at "Partition check:". Why is this?
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.
My Cobalt fails to find init and the root filesystem, what gives?
One of two things is happening here. First, you may have forgotten to compile in support for your root filesystem type. Sounds stupid, but many people do it. Second, your kernel may not know where your root filesystem is; there are two possible solutions to this...
The first solution is to go in to the ROM menu at boot time by pressing the spacebar from a serial console when prompted. You then enter "boot" and press enter. To set the root device, type the following followed by pressing enter, "set_root_dev hda4" (replacing hda4 with your root device of course). Then you need only reboot the Cobalt.
In the case where the above fails to solve the problem you'll need to pull the disk out and put in a computer, mount the partition containing your kernel image, and uncompress the image. Then, run the following command:
# rdev vmlinux /dev/hda4
Be sure to replace hda4 with your own root partition. Recompress the kernel image and you should be good to go.
I installed (some distribution) on my Cobalt, but it hangs when starting 'init'!
It could be that you've installed an i686 libc (or more) on a 3000 series Cobalt. The 3000 series systems need i386 binaries.
When my Cobalt boots I get spammed with syntax errors for `setfont`, what gives?
Not sure, but /etc/init.d/consolefont does not need to be loaded. To disable it use the following command:
# rc-update del consolefont boot
During boot time when loading keymaps I see "Couldnt get a file descriptor referring to the console", ideas?
Once again, a serial console based system has no need for keymaps, disable them by doing:
# rc-update del keymaps boot