Realtek 8101/8102 support for Dell mini 1012 netbook

[Curtis Rempel]

Back in 2011 I configured a pxe server with clonezilla live to image my new win xp installed Dell mini 10 netbook. Everything worked great, I was able to restore it a number of times.

From the ssh location where I saved the image, the software used was:

Image was saved by these Clonezilla-related packages:
drbl-1.9.5-79 clonezilla-2.3.5-21 mkswap-uuid-0.1.1-1 drbl-partimage-0.6.8-1drbl drbl-ntfsprogs-2.0.0-4 partclone-0.2.7-1drbl drbl-chntpw-0.0.20040818-7 drbl-lzop-1.02-0.8drbl pigz-2.1.6-1 pbzip2-1.1.0-1drbl udpcast-20091031-1drbl

Fast forward to 2015 and I’ve built another pxe server with 2.4.2-32 and it seems to no longer work, looking like the module for the nic isn’t present - “Waiting for ethernet card(s) up...” is pretty much the last message.

I’m not entirely sure what iso I grabbed the vmlinuz, initrd, and squashfs from for the above versions, but I don’t think I have it any more. Any ideas if a zip or iso with the above live version is available for me to try?

Or can I somehow use a current version to get this going again?

Thanks

[Steven Shiau]

This is weird. The old device should be supported by the new Linux kernel in Clonezilla live.
Could you take a photo about the error on the screen then post it?
Thanks.

Steven.

[Curtis Rempel]

Thanks Steven. I've attached a screenshot attempting to boot 2.4.2-32 where you can see "Waiting for ethernet card(s) up..." near the bottom followed by long delays for the remaining messages. Like I said, I've used clonezilla live over pxe before with no problems on this hardware but I don't know exactly which iso I used other than the version info in my previous post from the backup it saved. Strange that I can pxe boot far enough into the kernel before it fails. I've seen a few posts regarding autoneg on the r8169 and disabling it helped apparently. I've also installed Fedora 22 and RHEL 6.6 over pxe boot and both work fine with the r8169 module.

[Barcoboy]

I am having the exact same problem with PXE booting after upgrading to 2.4.2-32. Trying VMware ESX VMs which use the e1000 network driver, VMware Fusion VMs that use the pcnet32 network driver, as well as our lab workstations that use the e1000e network driver, and they all fail at this exact same spot.

Three things I have noticed looking at the boot logs:

1) The Broadcom NetExtreme bnx2x driver loads in addition to the active ethernet driver (not sure if it stays loaded when it can't find a card), and I see from the above screenshot that it also loads in Curtis' case.

2) The ethernet card is detected as eth0, but there is always a message saying that the ethernet device name has been renamed from eth0. The device it is renamed to varies by machine... I've seen "ens32", "eno16777736", etc.

3) There is never a link established message from the ethernet driver, even though a link is present.

Here is the configuration I use in my pxelinux.cfg/default file to boot:

label clonezilla
kernel http://12.34.56.78/clonezilla/vmlinuz
append initrd=http://12.34.56.78/clonezilla/initrd.img boot=live live-config union=aufs noswap nolocales nosplash noprompt ip=frommedia fetch=http://12.34.56.78/clonezilla/filesystem.squashfs keyboard-layouts=NONE locales=en_US.UTF-8 ocs_prerun1="busybox tftp -g -r /nbi_img/clonezilla/startup-script -l /tmp/startup-script 12.34.56.78" ocs_prerun2="bash /tmp/startup-script" timezone=America/Montreal utc=no vga=788 i915.blacklist=yes radeonhd.blacklist=yes nouveau.blacklist=yes vmwgfx.enable_fbdev=no

BTW, my PXE server is a Slackware Linux box and boots other images fine, including the last version of Clonezilla I was using before upgrading, which was 2.3.2-22 (using the exact same pxelinux.cfg/default configuration).

[Steven Shiau]

@Curtis,
Could you please give Clonezilla live 20150930-wily or 2.4.2-56 a try?
http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php
They come with newer Linux kernel so it might help.

@Todd,
Please also try the above versions, and because live-boot and linux kernel are newer, the boot parameters are very different. Therefore plaese remember to check the syslinux/isolinux.cfg in the Clonezilla live and update your PXE config.

Please let me know the results. Thanks.

Steven.

[Curtis Rempel]

Hi Steven,

Yes, -56 fixed it, however I also got the ehci-orion error like Todd. But, after checking the append line at clonezilla.org/livepxe.php and seeing it was different than mine, I replaced it with the one from above and it now works just fine. I suspect I had an old version of the append line from my previous config.

Thanks again for your help!

[Barcoboy]

Hi Steven. Yes, this fixed the problem. The network card is now detected and filesystem.squashfs is loaded. It now stops after loading with the following messages:

Begin: Mounting "/live/medium/live/filesystem.squashfs" on "//filesystem.squashfs" via "/dev/loop"... done.
mount: mounting aufs on /root/ failed: No such device
mount aufs on /root/ failed with option -o noatime,,dirs=/live/overlay/=rw://filesystem.squashfs/=rr+wh
modprobe: module ehci-orion not found in modules.dep

I'll check out the boot parameters and see if I can get it going again.

Thanks!

[Barcoboy]

After modifying the boot parameters, everything is working great again. Thanks so much.

[Steven Shiau]

Sure. Enjoy!

Steven.