Hi,

I have this doofy Cobalt Raq4 hand-me-down that I managed to get to run Debian woody (what a huge pain, but it works).  Currently my kernel is 2.4.20.

I just bought at 250 GB IDE hard drive as this is my backup "server" but when booting with the new drive the kernel hangs during the Partition Check.  Investigation on google says that this can be averted using ide=nodma as a kernel boot parameter.  

Ok, so this Cobalt thing doesn't use lilo/silo/grub whatever, it uses a special BIOS that ignores the MBR and just loads the kernel at bootup without the option to pass any boot parameters except through the Cobalt ROM boot menu (set_params "ide=nodma" - which does indeed solve the hang), but that setting doesn't stick so it has to be done EVERY TIME the machine is booted and since it's headless I'd need to have a serial line connected to this dang thing all the time.  

So, I was thinking of re-building the kernel, which I've done a few times, but I do not know is there a way to build the kernel and have it always load with a set of custom boot parameters?  Remember - no lilo/grub etc. - just loads the kernel.  Or I suppose I could recompile the kernel w/o IDE DMA?  I wonder how this thing would handle 2.6.x?

Thx,

Josh


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