Especially for Friday afternoons …
Never put off till tomorrow something you can avoid doing all togetherApologies to … well, possibly Benjamin Franklin or Mark Twain but who can be sure?
Perhaps it was
Co muzes udelat dnes, neodkladej na zitrek.
I have a Dell PowerEdge 700 sitting here, currently not used. Ubuntu doesn't boot on it – halfway through boot it drops down to the initramfs shell. The cause is the presence of an Adaptec 39160 SCSI controller – remove that and the machine boots.
These cards should work, there are even vendor-provided drivers and source code. Yes, there may have been an IRQ conflict with the mobo USB controller – but changing that didn't help.
Life's too short to debug this sort of thing. Goodbye, Adaptec card. I'll use SATA disks instead, thanks. RAID can be an OS task for now … until I pick up an Intel or 3ware “real hardware” RAID controller some time.
Update: Once the controller is removed, normal installation can proceed on another disk. Then the newly-installed kernel has no problem whatsoever booting up with the controller in place! So whatever the real problem it, it's something to do with the installation kernel modules for Ubuntu 7.10 and 7.06, and Knoppix 5.1. Life is still too short for this.
Google can track me back to October 1990. Before that I was mostly on JANET, not the rest of the Internet. There are even things on there that I'd rather forget, but of course they're part of the memory of the net, now.