[SOLVED] How to get Zimage to load on a funky/old BIOS

[madhits45]

I have an older PC I am trying to get xpenology running on. It has a ICH7R chipset.

 

There is a guy on these forums named AllGamer who has almost the same specs and got xpenology to work. I just don't know how he did it. See: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10267&start=60#p64624

 

My system gets stuck at loading zimage and than goes back to the boot menu after booting from the usb. I figure this has to be because I have ICH7R but I'm not sure why. I tried to disable my PATA chain but that made no difference. I want to use this board because It will allow me to hook up many IDE hard drives that I have lying around.

 

Do I need a driver for my board? Its a MSI intel 945p with ICH7R south bridge. The LAN is intel gigabyte and is on the approved list of hardware.

 

Here are the specs: http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?id=1643

 

UPDATE: See final post for solution.

Edited July 18, 2016 by Guest

[madhits45]

ANYONE?

Edited July 11, 2016 by Guest

[madhits45]

Son of a...

 

"Build 2668++ does support your hardware (including network card and SATA controller, my rig is quite similar, 775 socket, ICH7 controller, but I have an extra Intel card next to the Yukon, and 2668++ works perfectly), so I see no reason, apart from badly configured network, why it would not work."

 

So I just got 2668++ to run and I wonder if this is possible to update to 5.2? Now that is my question...

 

UPDATE 2: I got •NanoBoot 5.0.4.1 to run. Damn it, is there a way to upgrade beyond that. Although if this is it I'm pretty happy.

 

UPDATE 3: Looks like Naonboot will not see my hard drives. DRAT...

[sbv3000]

I would try a 'stripped down' build to check if it boots 5.2;

Remove any add on cards

Factory default the bios

Disable any unnecessary peripherals (serial/parallel/audio etc)

Disable the via and intel ide

Boot with a single sata drive

 

If that works then re-enable the intel ide channels (ide mode) and see if they work, ditto the via (ide mode).

 

If I recall, XPE has a basic set of ide drivers, so you might not see all drives attached.

Also, not sure how the old 'master/slave/cable select' options on ide might work so you might need to play with the drive jumpers on that and see what happens.

[madhits45]

I would try a 'stripped down' build to check if it boots 5.2;

Remove any add on cards

Factory default the bios

Disable any unnecessary peripherals (serial/parallel/audio etc)

Disable the via and intel ide

Boot with a single sata drive

 

If that works then re-enable the intel ide channels (ide mode) and see if they work, ditto the via (ide mode).

 

If I recall, XPE has a basic set of ide drivers, so you might not see all drives attached.

Also, not sure how the old 'master/slave/cable select' options on ide might work so you might need to play with the drive jumpers on that and see what happens.

 

THANKS For your response.. Ok So I figured my VIA raid card would not work. It does have IDE/Raid mode and I have it in IDE. I have been playing with 4.1 2668++ and it appears to load the VIA in IDE. However I am not sure. Nanoboot definitely does not load them. I also have a silicon image 0680 (See: http://www.siig.com/media/files/manuals ... -0369a.pdf). I get the same results with 2668++ as the via so it appears to work, but nanoboot does not.

 

I tried many options with xpenoboot and nothing got me past the loading zimage stage. I will try to connect 1x sata drive and disable everything else. Perhaps that will work, maybe the zimage fails when it sees no hard drives.

[Trantor]

Your system should boot even without driver for storage and network.

 

When booting edit boot command line in grub and remove loglevel=0.

This will show lot of informations during boot and maybe display more than booting zImage.

[madhits45]

Your system should boot even without driver for storage and network.

 

When booting edit boot command line in grub and remove loglevel=0.

This will show lot of informations during boot and maybe display more than booting zImage.

 

Trantor.. THANK YOU for looking at my post!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Ok I tried what you said and took the logline out. It still bounces back to the install screen with the 3 options. Any ideas?

 

UPDATE:

I tried 2x USB drives. A 1gb and a 2gb but both work with 5565.2 or previous fine. My machine is 64bit but it does not have intel vt support, not sure what changed after 5565.2.

 

Just to RULE out VGA as an issue. I tried booting vga=ask and it still bounces back to the 3 options without proceeding past loading zimage ...

Tried 5.2-5644.5, 5.2-5644.4, & 5.2-5644.1, 5592.2, 5592.1 AND Only 5565.2 & before boot.

 

SO THE QUESTION is what changed after 5565.2? Nothing beyond this version boots for me? I also have no IDE for VIA or SI pci controllers. So I need drivers for VIA 6410 and/or SI680. I asked for them in the driver request page. Any chance that will happen?

[madhits45]

I have been trying to figure out why 5565.2 and before works vs the newer versions. My Linux knowledge is limited at best. but I think it maybe because of the compression used. Its possible that the zimage is to large. I did notice that the zimage on 5565 is about 2 meg smaller than on 5644.5. Could this be why it wont load?

 

Here is a write up on zimage vs bzimage. You guys should switch over to bzimage as I believe it will be better anyway.

 

bzImage is the target used for x86 architectures working with PC BIOS. In contrast, zImage is an architecture-specific target most commonly used for embedded devices and works well with their bootloaders.

 

The only difference is the type compression used. GZIP (older) is used for

zImage and BZIP2 (newer and more efficient) is used for bzImage. The

bzImage will be smaller, but the extra compression/decompression will take a

little more time when compiling and when booting (maybe fractions of a

second!). That's the only times the compression comes into play.

Here's what happens when Linux boots:

1. It loads the image into memory and runs it

a. In the old days, the image was small enough to fit into the lower

part of memory, but now it's larger so it needs to be compressed to load

into the first Meg..

2. It then executes the image

a. in the old days it was straight into the kernel, now the first thing

run is a tiny decompression program (ala pkunzip) tacked onto the beginning

of the file to extract the larger image, then run the extracted kernel.

 

Another way to make the kernel/image size smaller is to make more of the

options/features into modules (can't go into that much detail here, but

there is a goo HOW-TO on it).

 

I also found this interesting. I'm not sure why this is not working but again it has to be something at boot time that is causing the zimage to stop loading.. See: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/ ... clnk&gl=us

[sbv3000]

If you think it may be related to decompression and loading into 'reserved' or 'higher' memory, have you looked at the bios on the mobo to see if there are any options to alter the memory allocation of components, eg graphics? I also vaguely remember that on some older boards you could alter the memory addressing to work better with 'himem' type commands when memory started to get larger.

[madhits45]

If you think it may be related to decompression and loading into 'reserved' or 'higher' memory, have you looked at the bios on the mobo to see if there are any options to alter the memory allocation of components, eg graphics? I also vaguely remember that on some older boards you could alter the memory addressing to work better with 'himem' type commands when memory started to get larger.

 

I took a look at my bios. Nothing I could see about memory except making the video bios catchable. I tried to disable and enable that along with the other similar options but it made no difference. This decompression idea was just a theory as the versions before 5565.2 work for me. So I started to look at the USB files to see what was different and came up with this.

[madhits45]

Holly CRAP...

 

This is a disk image of my pen drive (512MB SD card). Plz try if it works or not: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwkmhb ... sp=sharing

 

This file is created by:

1. Download Synoboot: https://github.com/Jman420/nanoBoot-DSM ... 3612xs.img

2. Write the file to pen drive.

3. Expand the partition and filesystem to ~100MB. Expansion of ext filesystem is way easier than FAT, and that is one of the reasons why I choose Synoboot.

4. Replace zImage with *ORIGINAL* XPEnology 5.6-5644.5 one.

5. Compress modified ramdisk (with synobios.ko hax) with gzip as rd.gz

6. Add initrd parameter in /boot/grub/grub.conf.

7. dd if=/dev/sdX of=img

 

THIS FIXED MY PROBLEM. I also had the bios reset issue but now I can also install 5644.5!! WOOOO WHOOOO

[madhits45]

Just to finish this off and provide a solution to those who are curious.

 

I have been unable to load zimage off the usb since I first tried on my msi intel 945p system. The problem lied in the way zimage is loaded into memory. When zimage was smaller 15mb this was no issue but now that its over 15mb it wont load, I believe ldlinux.sys is the culprit. BZimage should be used for these larger images but I could not get the devs to release it in that way. The problem is outlined here: https://www.ibiblio.org/oswg/oswg-night ... image.html

 

So to solution is to use an app called WinSetupFromUSB. What this does is wrap the xpenology loader in a separate loader which I'm guessing pushes it into a different memory block and allows xpenoboot to boot for me and maybe others if you have this issue. Get WinSetupFromUSB point it at your already created USB stick for xpenoboot and use the syslinux bootloader/linux distro option. Now winsetupusb will overwrite some files and add a menu but I was able to change the timeout to zero so it boots pretty damn fast.

 

I hope the devs take a look at this thread and try to address it by using bzimage in the future.