Ubuntu on Kohjinsha SC3 Again

**dothedog** · February 3rd, 2009

All, I have been chasing this thing for a while, it appears there are a number of people trying to get Ubuntu on their SC3's. I just haven't found anyone that has succeeded. A quick search on these forums gives these threads:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...=kohjinsha+sc3
no responses

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...=kohjinsha+sc3
again no responses

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...=kohjinsha+sc3
no resolution

I've also found some Japanese sites:
http://www31.atwiki.jp/d4linux/pages...ml#id_275847c0
this is actually for a Sharp/Willcom D4 but has similar hardware

http://whitesc3.blog7.fc2.com/blog-date-200808.html
this guy uses grub for dos

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/yamato-y/
This guy looks like he chainloads from vista bootloader

OK, so here is the issue, I am trying to install using 8.04.2 (actually a custom liveCD from http://mockety.zapto.org/ubuntu-ja-8...h-20090118.iso for the D4 it gives you the correct screen resolution 1024x600) This custom cd is in Japanese, but it also has a modified grub/menu.lst that includes:
irqpoll all_generic_ide
That last line is required for the live cd to "see" the hard disk.

So, I have tried a whole bunch of distros and they all have the same symptoms. Since, the SC3 doesn't have a DVD Drive, I am using unetbootin to load it on to a bootable USB Drive. With the irqpoll all_generic_ide line in grub/menu.lst the hard drive shows in the liveCD environment as /dev/sdaX. You can install from the liveCD. Ensure that you install grub at the end. However, on reboot, the grub boot menu shows up, select any item in the menu, add the irqpoll all_generic_ide to it, then click "b", and it immediately goes to a blank screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left had corner. The other thing I have tried is boot with the liveCD, then at the grub menu select boot from first hard drive. That gets it moving but it hangs on detecting the hard drives. For some reason it is picking up a sdb and an sdc when i only have a USB drive and a hard drive so you would think it should only have a sda and sdb?

This netbook has a Poulsbo Chipset SCH 500M Onboard Graphics and Atom proc. and an ATA hard drive. Which for some reason is not supported in Intrepid.

Also, when I tried the Ubuntu-mobile Menlow image, it overwrote my windows XP partitions, (should have looked a little closer before installing oops) so chainloading from windows won't work either...

Anyone with an SC3 that has had success please let me know how you did it!!!

Thanks,
DoTheDog

**dstew** · February 3rd, 2009

However, on reboot, the grub boot menu shows up, select any item in the menu, and it immediately goes to a blank screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left had corner.

At the grub menu, highlight a menu item, and instead of pressing 'return' press 'e' for edit. Select the kernel line, press 'e' again, and add the same kernel parameters to the end of the line that you used to get the Live CD to work (irqpoll and all_generic_ide). After editing the line, press 'return' to save it, the 'b' to boot. See if that makes a difference.

**dothedog** · February 3rd, 2009

thanks for the reply. Yeah I kind of mis-typed that. I have changed the grub/menu.lst on the hard drive to include the irqpoll all_generic_ide. It does the same thing. Just blank screen and blinking cursor in the upper left corner.

I also just tried booting to the USB stick then selecting "Boot from first Hard disk", editing the kernel params and booting. It actually starts booting then ends with:
Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
Done.
Check root= bootarg cat /proc/modules ls /dev
ALERT! Does not exist. Dropping to shell!

and I get an initramfs prompt...

Ok, I just got it to boot from the USB Stick "Boot from first Hard disk". the line originally looked like this:
/ubnkern initrd=/ubninit -
I added irqpoll all_generic_ide root=/dev/sda1 to it and it booted!

the whole line looks like this:
/ubnkern initrd=/ubninit irqpoll all_generic_ide root=/dev/sda1 -

Now I have to figure out how to boot this thing without the USB Stick...

**dothedog** · February 3rd, 2009

Ok, since I can boot to the installed OS with the USB stick, I tried making the same changes to boot/grub/menu.lst. So I changed the "kernel" record from root=UUID=lotsoflettersandnumbers to root=/dev/sda1.

Still no love.

Any ideas?

**dothedog** · February 3rd, 2009

When I boot from the USB stick, even though it says boot from the first hard drive, it is actually booting the /ubnkern and /ubninit so I guess what it's not doing when booting from the hard drive with no USB is it can't find the kernel and initrd files?

Here is the record in the menu.lst
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-22-ws016sh ro irqpoll all_generic_ide root=/dev/sda1
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-22-ws016sh

Those files do exist in the /boot directory.

Any ideas why grub wouldn't be able to find them?

**dstew** · February 3rd, 2009

Maybe the root statement is wrong (the grub root I mean, not the kernel root). You can try different root arguments like (hd1,0) to see. To do it more systematically, you can boot grub, and press 'c' to get a grub command line. On the command line you can do 'geometry (hd0)' to see which disk grub is calling (hd0), if you can figure that out from the disk geometry.