Re: Getting amd64 stretch netinstall to work.
Hi,
Felix Miata wrote:
> > Never have I seen any other PC reliably take *so* long. Its
> > master /boot partition begins @282.4MB, ends @682.5.
Gene Heskett wrote:
> 600 something is beyond the reach of some bios, I seen the figure 504megs
> bandied about from several sources.
That would be 20 bit block addressing (log(504)/log(2) = 8.98, i.e. 504 MiB
need 29 bit. Minus the 9 for block size makes 20).
The lowest reported LBA address size was 24. I.e. 8 GiB of disk range.
If the mainboard was indeed incapable of accessing a higher block range,
then it would probably have a quite outdated BIOS with 28 bit LBA addressing
which can reach up to 128 GiB (2 exp 28 * 2 exp 9 = 137,438,953,472).
If such a limit was hit, then BIOS would not work with that block range
at all, not just slowly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing
says
"The current 48-bit LBA scheme was introduced in 2003 with the ATA-6
standard."
Gene's board seems to be not older than 2008.
(Once there was a size limit with the ISOLINUX boot loader which could
fail on LBA that exceeded 16 bit. Caused by a bug with initializing
the upper 16 bit of the processor register that held the LBA.
To be safe, isolinux.bin had to sit in the first 32 MiB of the ISO.)
Can it be that there are cooling problems caused by the new kernel on
the main board where any thermal paste is dry now and possibly some
plastic clamps have become brittle ?
A black screen with a blinking cursor could be a failed GRUB start
after a system breakdown.
Have a nice day :)
Thomas
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