From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0) Description of problem: See bug 59353. This occurs on a Sony Vaio with no /dev/fd0 - thus the message from modprobe at boot that block-major-2 can't be found. However, there is a USB floppy attached and the BIOS supports booting from this device - the Linux kernel doesn't, I guess. It would be nice to be able to turn off the many "block-major-2 not found" messages at boot time. Since modprobe is reporting this, it would seem that this should be configurable without rebuilding the kernel. Is that possible? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel 2.4.9-31 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot on a machine with no floppy (/dev/fd0) 2. 3. Actual Results: Get 10 or 15 of the following message: modprobe: modeprobe: Can't locate module block-major-2 This occurs just after the USB modules have loaded and after each USB module loads (and other times as well), though I don't know if there's a relationship between the USB modules and modprobe's problem with block-major-2 Expected Results: 1. No "Can't locate module block-major-2" messages. 2. Ability to boot from a USB floppy. Additional info: See bug 59353.
add alias block-major-2 off to the /etc/modules.conf file that ought to get rid of the message
Yeah, that worked just fine. Thanks very much. Guess I should have read the modules.conf man page earlier. I had checked modules.conf, but didn't think to look for a man page. Is my understanding correct that the abilty to boot from a USB device not a part of the kernel as yet? Regards, Roy
booting is a bootloader issue (eg lilo/grub) The bootloader needs to load the kernel, and uses the bios for that I assume the bios emulation of a floppy is good enough Once stuff is loaded, the kernel can use the usb floppy as usb; just needs putting the usb drivers in the initrd I think (haven't tried this though... I don't have such a fancy laptop ';)
Grub - that's right, it's not the kernel. I tried booting from the floppy, but Grub didn't like it. The USB floppy did get accessed (it made a noise, anyway), but Grub couldn't find a boot image - this is with a boot floppy created during the install. I should try this with lilo some time - when I've got some time to mess with it. Thanks for your help, Roy
By the way, I don't know if you want to close this or not. I, personally, don't need to be able to boot from a USB floppy (the cdrom is fine) and my block-major-2 issue is fixed. If you want to close it, please feel free. Roy
I rather close it; the "boot from usb floppy" doesn't have much to do with the block-major-2 topic and should be in a separate bug really.