Hi, I got hold of an Alphastation 500 a few days ago and I'm trying to install Sarge on it (I thought I could maybe help testing the installer). While I'm quite at ease with Debian on intel machines, I'm a total newbie when it comes to Alpha machines, SRM and the like, though I've read the SRM howto. (I should probably read it a couple more times to get things going). I grabbed the 5 mb cdrom iso image from /debian/dists/testing/main/installer-alpha/current/images/ tonight, booted, and started the installation process. First problem was during hardware detection: sr_mod.o was not found, and I got an error message. Then came the time to partition the disk. I wiped of the previous partitions for which I had no use and got / and swap on the first disk, and /home and /var on the second disk, using ext3 everywhere. I was not able to configure LVM, but this may be because I don't know anything about LVM, and didn't stop to read the documentation. Installation went fine until I had to make my system bootable, which failed, I was told, because aboot wanted an ext2 partition. This was discussed mentionned on this list last january, so I won't insist. I got back to the partitionning step, removed the / partition, inserted a small 2MB partition formated as ext2, not mounted at the beginning of the disk, put back / to fit the remaining space, and relaunched the installation of the base system which failed twice. The first failure was "dpkg: syntax error: unknown user 'root' in statusoverride file", and was caused by exim4. The second error because /target/usr/bin/awk was an existing symling on mawk and ln is not called with the -f option. I removed the statoverride file and the symlink and relaunched the installation (twice) and finally got back to the installation of aboot which failed again: the installer asked me on which partition the bootloader should be installed, and proposed the only ext2 partition on my machine, namely /dev/sda1, I sayed ok, and it failed because "bootcode overlaps with partition #1. If you really want this, use -f1". I read some doc, and issued manually "/target/sbin/swriteboot -f1 /dev/scsi/host1/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /target/boot/bootlx" and this failed because "existing disk label is corrupt. Couldn't get a valid disk label, exiting". I tried using /dev/scsi/host1/bus0/target0/lun0/disc and the command ran. I rebooted the machine. I asked SRM to boot dkb0 and got the aboot prompt, after a warning about "ext2_init: bad magic 0x1" and "aboot: mount of partition 1 failed". Using "b 2/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2" produces a "Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)" probably related to "VFS: Cannot open root device "sda2" or unknown-block(0,0)" If anyone can tell me how to get any further or point me to the appropriate to documentation, I'll be very grateful. Thanks in advance. -- Alexandre Fayolle http://alexandre.fayolle.free.fr/blog/
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