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"IDE kernel"

August 03, 2008 — BarryK
Some people testing 4.1alpha5 have reported bootup/instability/shutdown problems. I want to find out if any of this is related to the PATA drivers. Lobster for example, reports that it hangs after a few minutes use -- I don't see how that is anything to do with the hard drive driver, but you never know.

So, if Puppy 4.00 worked for you but 4.1alpha has this kind of problem, try this new build with "IDE kernel" -- this has the older IDE drivers instead of the PATA drivers. Get it from here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/test/puppy-4.1alpha5/
It is named 'puppy-4.0.5-ide_kernel.iso'

Conversely, if 4.1alpha1 did work for you, we should find out if this IDE kernel does too. Otherwise, we might solve someone's problem but create one for someone else.

Comments

Some people testing 4.1alpha5 have reported bootup/instability/shutdown problems.
Username: ANOSage
I had decided not to install the alphas for the moment until ongoing issues had settled. However, I have now performed a FULL install of regular 4.1alpha5 on utterly bog std. HW. Boot up is the fastest yet, all settings are retained, the system is stable and shuts down fully, provided menu.lst is edited to acpi=force with SiS chipsets. If I get a chance, I will overwrite it early tomorrow with puppy-4.0.5-ide_kernel.iso and report again.

405_ide
Username: dogone
"An initial surprise here after booting 405_ide with pfix=clean and directing it to a copy of my 405 pup_save file. 405_ide performed the "clean-up" without incident and booted/rebooted perfectly. However, while drive icons for each HD partition (hda1, hda3 and hda4) appear on screen, Pmount lists not such drive - lists no hard drives at all. I can therefore not mount any HD partition. My floppy drive and flash stick are listed and can be mounted. I tried moving the 405_ide pup_save to the flash stick. 405_ide boots nicely but still no HD detected. Booting 405_ide from CD with pfix=ram is flawless. My HD is detected and mountable. I will commence testing 405_ide drive i/o using pfix-ram.

Great news
Username: veronicathecow
"Yipee, Puppy working again! I can see why people are raving about the current state of Puppy. Very nice, thanks to Barry etc. Intel D201GLY MB. Now booting okay where as before it was hanging at loading Kernel. (Frugal install) SATA HDD and SATA DVD. No PATAs. First bad news. It says session not saved when exiting Puppy. Gxine. No Input plug in found when trying to play DVD Also get another box with Read error from /dev/dvd BBC Weather and Seamonkey great. AVI's great Speed, great Icons great Cheers Tony

405 IDE
Username: Flapdoodle
"405 IDE on AMPTRON K7 810LM Duron 800 w/256 RAM. "Searching drives for Puppy files..." took 8 minutes and 7 seconds. (That is what 4.0 does on this machine either with the HD installed or not.) Then it finished with a blank screen. 405 SATA (SeaMonkey) takes 4-8 seconds for the files search. I am delighted with 405 SATA.

405_ide
Username: dogone
"I should have mentioned in my first post that my "missing" HD can be mounted manually and is completely usable. The problem then appears to be with Pmount. I did nothing unusual re Pmount or Puppy Event Manager config under 405 so can't see why Pmount in 405_ide is unhappy. My 405/405_ide Pmount config is: pmountauto=false pmountengine=default pmountquit=false (it would be nice if these were one file and not three)

405_ide cont'd
Username: dogone
"Second update: Unplugging my flash drive corrected Pmount's HD detection problem under 405_ide AND caused/permitted four new icons to appear on my desktop, "hda1", "hda3", "hda4" for the HD and "hdb" for my DVD drive. All function normally (clicking opens Rox directly). Pmount also now lists all devices. BUT... this time around the desktop also displays icons labeled "sda1", "sda3" and "sda4". "sda1" is represented by the flash drive icon while "sda3" and "sha4" are represented by hard drive icons. Fly over any of these and drive details appear. Click on one and Pmount opens - not Rox. Two things as significant here. First, the presence of my 2GB flash drive confuses Pmount and prevents Event Manager from posting icons for hdaX and hdb on the desktop. Second, those sdaX icons appear left over from 405. Very strange. Other than this, once mounted, all drives function normally.

405_ide cont'd/final
Username: dogone
"Forgive the multiple posts. Immediately following my last post, I rebooted 405_ide and pointed it to the very same pup_save file. Flash drive not installed. Bang! Kernel panic at around switch root (can't be certain). I powered-off and rebooted. Boot was smooth and successful AND... Those residual sdX icons are nowhere to be seen. My 405_ide desktop now appears normal with all device icons in their places with bright shinning faces. Everything appears to work as advertised. Ok now. Have I just ruined your day or made it better? ;-).

405_ide cont'd/final
Username: dogone
"Forgive the multiple posts. Immediately following my last post, I rebooted 405_ide and pointed it to the very same pup_save file. Flash drive not installed. Bang! Kernel panic at around switch root (can't be certain). I powered-off and rebooted. Boot was smooth and successful AND... Those residual sdX icons are nowhere to be seen. My 405_ide desktop now appears normal with all device icons in their places with bright shinning faces. Everything appears to work as advertised. Ok now. Have I just ruined your day or made it better? ;-).

Update
Username: ANOSage
"OK - I found some time. Both versions work just fine. There are some subtle differences in what gets mounted, dots on drives, etc. but all that stuff is trivial for users. Cfdisk doesn't come up unless the whole path is entered - apparently it needs adjusting to point to sd? as well as hd? I was able to auto-update each version back and fore using pfix=ram, but, as usual, the GRUB updater doesn't work - that needs to be done by a 'new' install from a pfix=ram liveCD boot up. Now for the punchline: subjectively, the new (sd?) version boots a FULL install much quicker (factor of x2 or x3? haven't got time to measure it tonight). Frankly, If you've got old HD s to spare (I've got ~fifty) and work on desktops, there's little point in not adopting FULL installation and benefiting from its many advantages. However, I do recognise that younger folk like to keep mobile, so might want to use USB flash - if it works, or liveCD if it doesn't.

405 ide
Username: eprv
"Epia-v usb boot Exactly the same as 405 xfs mounted manually after modprobe xfs same bug with pmount save and reboot OK no spell check in Abiword that was also in 405. both 405 and 405 ide are fast and very responsive usable for me. thanks

405ide works for me
Username: GeoW
" Seems to work quite well. I downloaded and isobusted puppy405ide, I copied my 405 save file into the new directory, and booted with pfix=clean. I got some icons on top of other icons, got a new hdc icon, one of ny rox icons disappeared, and I needed to redo some customizing. No serious problems: pmount seems to work fine, as does gxine, Geany ( printing w CUPS ), Seamonkey, and Ayttm. I have seen no problems! Intel D850MV, P4/1.5GHz, 256MB RDRAM, 16G HD/ 1 NTFS partition GeoW

405_ide
Username: dogone
"FYI, another instance of missing HDs: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/posting.php?mode=quote&p=220911

ide
Username: KJ
"I can't see any real difference between 405 and 405ide on my older kits HDD behavior. Global fonts work with 405ide ... thanks. Thank you so much for all your hours of work in making Puppy so tight and well behaved. I uderstand the need to move on to other projects and look forward to your sharing some of them with us. May a cool breeze be at your back in all you do and good health be upon you. KJ


Tags: puppy