[rescue] Motorola Powerstack help needed

[Meelis Roos]

Hi,

I have a Motorola Powerstack II Pro4000 (PReP IBM clone) as my gateway 
here (PPC 604e 300 MHz, IBM chipset, PCI CL5446 VGA, onboard Sym82c825 
SCSI, 192M RAM, Asante PCI NIC with DC-21140, Adaptec 2940 additional 
PCI SCSI). It's running Linux to keep testing that newer versions of 
Linux work fine on it (have caught several problem in the past).

But the machine has been behaving strange lately, with software that 
worked fine before.

All was well until I found that I can not boot the latest selfcompiled 
kernel from disk. Linux kernel has a small loader at the beginning that 
asks for boot command line. I have set a default command line and now 
the command line was mangled and overwrittent with lots of copies of 
previously outputed string fragment " loaded at 0".

OK, seems like a glitch with the kernel. But things got even worse - I 
could not successfully boot previously working kernel images either. The 
same effect happens to them, with varying level. The kernel either fails 
to boot at all or boots and gets garbage as the boot command line and 
never finds the root to mount.

By trial and error I found an older kernel image that got the command 
line corrupted but root= part happened to be untouched so I could boot 
up again.

I tried the following thing and none helped, so now I'm out of ideas and 
hope somebody here has some ideas.

Tried set-defaults in OF prompt, removing secondary NIC and secondary 
scsi adapter, tried with only one set of RAM sticks (original 2x32M and 
Compaq 2x64M), booted from disk and from network. Nothing helped.

Any ideas?

-- 
Meelis Roos (mroos at linux.ee)