debian woes with t23

[l.butler]

I have been running Debian (Etch then Lenny) for some time on my T23. After the last upgrade, Lenny is no longer bootable -- it boots into the initrd, but it appears unable to mount the root partition to start init. I decided I'd try to upgrade to Squeeze (testing branch) on another partition, only to find the same thing when I tried to boot into the new installation.

I suspect that the latest upgrades have removed the needed modules from the kernel. Does anyone know if this is true?
Better, do you have a work around.

In general, I'm unhappy with the way old hardware is being treated by Debian and the Linux kernel. I know that sound drivers were removed from the kernel on the grounds they were binary blobs, and it appears from the notes during installation of Squeeze that ethernet drivers have been removed, too.

Any info or suggestions are appreciated.

[tom lightbody]

> Lenny is no longer bootable--it boots into the initrd, but it appears
> unable to mount the root partition to start init.

possibly the hard-drive name has changed, from "hda" to "sda" or
vice versa. Try changing the name in bootloader, also in /etc/fstab.

[l.butler]

No, the problem with Lenny was me.
As part of the 'updates' I tweaked the mount options to allow the hdd to spindown during long periods of inactivity (say > 20mins). I was mislead because the Squeeze installation was barfing at exactly the same step in the boot process, but for apparently different reasons.

The problem with Debian Squeeze remains, and as I indicated, I think this is due to a Debian policy change. On the plus side, after searching around and experimenting, I've found CrunchBang to be a nice distro on old hardware like the T23 -- it seems that many of the unfree drivers have been added back. The latest 'alpha' release is based on Squeeze.