We finally tracled this down to the disk drive - other quantums
(different models) worked, and this drive worked with earlier
kernels, but the boot problem definitely followed this drive around.
Mark Lord cam up with the goods on this:-
mlord@bnr.ca said:
} Okay, I think we got lucky here.
} I was working on something unrelated last night, and found the
} problem that you described..
} A long time ago, the routines to access user space were redesigned,
} and somebody updated my ioctl() routines to reflect this (likely was
} Linus).
} As a result, my ioctls which expect a 4-byte parameter got changed to
} expect a "long" parameter instead. On the DEC ALPHA, a long is 8
} bytes, not 4.
} This is the problem. I'll fix the ioctls() to use 4-byte parameters
} again, likely for 1.3.74.
I have just fired up a 1.3.74 kernel and the system is quite happy
again. I would suggest that IDE users avoid 1.3.70 to 1.3.73 since
you don't really know what other things could be happening to your
disks if the ioctls are damaged!
Nigel.
-- [ Nigel.Metheringham@theplanet.net - Unix Applications Engineer ] [ *Views expressed here are personal and not supported by PLAnet* ] [ PLAnet Online : The White House Tel : +44 113 2345566 x 612 ] [ Melbourne Street, Leeds LS2 7PS UK. Fax : +44 113 2345656 ]