Making room for more partitions, was: Re: [Techtalk] RH9: pah. Gentoo?

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2003 at 03:01:24PM -0700 or thereabouts, Akkana Peck wrote:
> Eeva writes:
> > I've heard that Knoppix can boot most anything, you might want to try
> > that for rescuing.
> 
> Even Knoppix can't boot a Vaio CD, at least not without the magic
> incantation.  I posted earlier about the magic Vaio CD incantation,
> but now I"m wondering if my posting made it to the list, since Conni
> never reported on whether it helped.  In any case, the incantation is to
> add "ide2=0x180,0x386" to the boot line.  This fixes the "loses track of
> CD as soon as PCMCIA loads" problem, at least in many installers and at
> least for the several-year-old Vaio CDROM I have.  YMMV.
> 
> Redhat up through 8.0 did this automatically.  What a bummer that they
> removed their Vaio CD support in Redhat 9!  I wonder why?  

Actually, I remember when I bought my Vaio that Red Hat at the
time did not get Vaios right. And we didn't know about that
useful line. Fortunately, Alan saw it as a challenge, and 
did the install somehow (brute force and copying all the rpms
onto another partition, I think.) That was in 2000, so around
RH 6.2 or 7.0 you still had to type that line in. 

I also remember being delighted that subsequent versions of Red 
Hat didn't need the messing about. Like you, I was not delighted
to find that the latest versions need it again.

I have found a bug report with the explanation of what is
happening: 

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=89966

  The newer kernel probes the cardbus early, when the cardbus 
  is probed the "magic" Vaio laptop IDE legacy settings vanish
  and the CD goes with it. Unfortunately RH9 looks for the CD, 
  then loads the drivers, then wonders where it went

  Installer bug I think, nothing the kernel can do about this. 

..but it still isn't the bug report I remember!

I think, in the end, I ended up using this for Red Hat 9.0:

linux ide1=0x180,0x386 text noprobe nopcmcia pci=off

(I doubt the text is necessary: I just don't like the mousepad!)

Telsa