Re: [Sheflug] Suggestions for Linux on an old Sony Vaio

[Chris Warburton <chriswarbo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 06:51 -0400, Morris, David (Allvac, UK) wrote:
> I've got an old Sony Vaio PCGA-R500 laptop (from memory - it's at home,
> I'm not). It doesn't have an optical drive, so to get Linux on it, I've
> installed it from another laptop that does have an optical drive. It
> boots up (GRUB), but during the load, I see a message similar to
> "waiting for hda1 to come up" and "waiting for hda2 to come up".
> Eventually, both these time out and I'm dumped in a very restrictive
> (GRUB?) shell. I can't ls or anything like that.
> 
> Can anyone suggest what I could do to get this box up and running?

If the problem is with 'hda1' or 'hda2' then that would suggest that the
problem is happening after Linux has loaded (GRUB calls
drives/partitions (hd0,0) and (hd0,1), Linux calls then hda1 and hda2). 

The way Linux boots starts off with a bootloader (GRUB) which finds the
Linux kernel (a file called vmlinuz) and its 'initial RAM disk' image
(called initrd) on your drive (usually in /boot), then runs the kernel
and puts the initrd into RAM so Linux can see it like a disk. Inside the
initrd are the drivers needed to access your hard drive (once Linux can
access the hard drive it can use all of the drivers that you have got
installed), so it seems the drivers you need aren't in there, and the
initrd also contains a failsafe shell called BusyBox, which is pretty
much useless since all you can use it to access is the contents of the
initrd, not the harddrive.

If you are on a Debian-based system (including Ubuntu) then you can add
drivers to the initrd by editing a text
file /etc/initramfs-tools/modules (the path may be slightly different as
different versions have renamed it recently), how you do this is
something you'll have to think of (could you edit it from the other
laptop you used to install it?), so just add the names of any kernel
modules (drivers) you need to that file and save it. Finding out the
needed ones might be troublesome though, since I just searched for that
model on Google and the only results I can find are for battery
chargers :(, anyway if you manage to find out which ones you need and
specify them in that file you can then rebuild the initrd with a command
like "dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-<the linux version you are
using>" (you can find out which one it is with 'uname -r' or see all
installed ones with 'ls /lib/modules'). Booting on the Sony laptop
should hopefully then work, since Linux should have access to the needed
drivers to access the harddrive (if you are not using a Debian-based
system just look and/or ask around in forums and things for your distro
about how to specify modules for initrd and rebuild it). I found out all
of this when trying to run from a USB harddrive on a system that doesn't
boot from USB, and it has worked fine for me for over a year, so I hope
the same solution works for you.

Thanks,
Chris Warburton


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