Exercise in Amusement

[Matthew Carpenter]

I recently inherited an old IBM ThinkPad 600E (300MHz and all!)  tha tI built 
for a friend a year or two ago.  Not that fast, but with 228M RAM and a 20gb 
drive it makes a fun little test bed.

As an exercise in amusement, I decided to upgrade from Ubuntu Hoary directly 
to Gutsy.  That's 5.04 to 7.10.

Aside from a few cases where file ownership changed from one package to 
another one that was still installed (ugh) things seemed to go pretty 
smoothly.  Except after rebooting...

I was having issues with hal starting up so I rebooted, only to be dumped to a 
failsafe mode in the initrd because /dev/hda5 no longer existed!  Apparently 
I had BIOS age issues.  I got this error message: BIOS age (1999) fails 
cutoff (2000).  Must use acpi=force to enable ACPI.  

I appended acpi=force onto the command line with not joy.  However, 
from "initramdisk" mode I was able to "cat /proc/partitions" and noticed that 
the new kernel *now* classified the hard drive as "/dev/sda".

Change root=/dev/hda5 to "root=/dev/sda5" and appended "acpi=force" and we're 
back underway...  hal did then install correctly :)

Not done yet, but all looks promising.

Matt

-- 
Matthew Carpenter
mcarpenter at intelguardians.com
http://www.intelguardians.com

PGP Fingerprint: 
87EB 54A8 FB42 0A0E B8AE CDA7 FF99 2A64 E70F 4466
hkp://wwwkeys.pgp.net
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://linux-sxs.org/pipermail/linux-users/attachments/20070930/fab6aa2e/attachment.bin