On booting installer, no keyboard or CDROM

[laidlaws]

This involves Cauldron, but the problem is more extensive than any distro.

On creating a backup DVD with Mondo, then booting from it, I lose the keyboard and the CD-ROM drive when the BIOS hands them over to the installer. The keyboard NumLock light is out. Mondo reports that it can't find the CD-ROM drive. A restore disk from mid-April has no problems. I was advised to add all the extra modules to the list in /usr/sbin/mindi, but that didn't help.

On trying to install Cauldron from both the ordinary boot.iso and the nonfree version, much the samething happens. When the choice of source comes up, the keyboard's NumLock light is on, but I can't use the keyboard. Booting the nonfree iso from within VirtualBox, I have no problems.

I have a Logitech USB keyboard. I have enabled USB support in the BIOS, but previously didn't have to. I changed my CD-ROM drive from a PATA LiteOn to a PATA by LG, with no change. I have a mobo by nVidia with two SATA slots, and a HD in each, one of the early ones that insist on making the IDE channel the primary one, with no choice. The CD drive is jumpered as a Master.

It sounds like a hardware issue, but I don't really know where to start looking.

[laidlaws]

Updating my BIOS made no difference. Sounds as though I need to dissect the restore disk I mention in Para 1.

[doktor5000]

I'd first compare the contents of the initrd's used for booting, you can look inside with lsinitrd (IIRC) and then compare that with one of the non-working ones.

[laidlaws]

There is a method at http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/07/how ... nitrd-img/ I will try that and report back.

[laidlaws]

This is getting very much over my head.

I downloaded the boot-nonfree.iso from the Mageia server, with wget. On mounting the downloaded image (NOT the burned CD) and looking inside the all.rdz file with lsinitrd, I see that all.rdz itself is owned by root, but all the modules etc. inside are owned by user doug and group boinc. I have user boinc set up with its own group and $HOME, and user doug is a member of group boinc, but my primary group is doug.

But how can computer-specific ownership get into the download? If I install a SRPM, I see a warning that the stated owner doesn't exist. That makes sense, and should (:?) happen in this case. Presumably, I could unpack the initrd, change the ownership and pack it again, but would it help?

Doug.

[doktor5000]

Would be better to post the output you're looking at ...
FWIW, nomally ownership is based on UIDs (user id's) and that gets resolved locally. So if a file has UID 500,
it will be displayed as belonging to the first user on that system (Mageia UIDs start with 500).
Either that or you looked at the wrong file.

[laidlaws]

That makes sense. The user created when installing a system has UID 500. On the machine that created the all.rdz file, that will show the username it assigns. On my machine, UID 500 is doug. The normal GID is 500 as well, but for some reason, the creator had the same GID as my boinc user. The examples with SRPMs are from other distros, which may start numbering UIDs at 1000, for example. It follows that the UID is not an issue.

I need to take a breather. I will come back when I have looked at the initrd created in mindi.iso.

BTW, because I am running a 32-bit system on an AMD64, my kernel is the server version. At the moment I have initrds for both server and desktop. The symlink initrd.img points to the server version. I have never seen this before.

[doktor5000]

The symlink initrd.img points to the server version. I have never seen this before.

The unversioned symlinks always point to the files corresponding to the default kernel. But what did you mean exactly, what haven't you seen before?

[laidlaws]

Sorry, I put that badly. What I meant was, I have never seen an initrd for the desktop kernel present when there is no desktop kernel. The symlink points where it was supposed to.