FAT bread failed

FAT bread failed


Author: Pierre Abbat

System Architecture: Intel
RedHat Release: RHL 5.1 (Manhattan)
FAQ Category: Booting and LILO
Modification Date: Sep 28, 1998

Question:

I have a Win95 machine and just added a new hard drive and Linux. It boots
fine from the floppy, but when I try loadlin, it waits a very long time
and says "FAT bread failed". (Try THIN matzo?) It boots, but I can't read
my Windows drive.

Answer:

Bread apparently means binary read. What happened is, first it checked hda
and it's fine. Then it checked hdb, which is the cdrom, got no answer,
reset it, tried again, and gave up. Then it tried hdc, which is the Linux
drive, and found it. But in resetting hdb, it messed up hda, and when it
tried to mount /win, it couldn't.

Here's the command that works:
loadlin vmlinuz root=/dev/hdc1 hdb=cdrom
(note that's root, not boot)

The phrase hdb=cdrom causes it to look for a cdrom, not a hard drive, on
hdb, and it doesn't reset it.


References:

None specified.