Floppyless install via ARC (was: Re: boot CD)

[scr <whoknows@onlinehome.de>]

Andy MacNamara schrieb:
>

Andy, I'm assuming that you try to install Debian (potato
or whatever) on an ARC-only machine, or do you fiddle with
other bootable CDs?

To make it short: I finally succeeded installing potato on
a PC164 using ARC firmware *floppyless*. Booting Linux
without floppies after the installation has finished is
no problem anyways (the ARC boot selection you have to
create for installation can be used for booting after
install with minor corrections).

> I'm trying to get a CD booted directly from the ARC console on an Alpha XL
> 266. ARC requires a FAT formatted partition with a Windows-style
> executable (IIRC) somewhere in it, this is how MILO boots Linux.

Well, yes and no. Booting via ARC requires a (small) FAT
partition, to where you have to place linload.exe (this is
not an AlphaNT executable, it's ARC-native) and milo (the
right one for your machine, of course). At least if you
want to avoid a floppy for that purpose alone.

> 2) the floppy controller on my machine doesn't work, so I MUST boot from
> CD.

Well, no. I assume you have a hard disk in your machine. ;-)

> 3) the potato CD images don't appear to have a MILO partition scheme
> working.

A FAT partition an a CD. Partitions on a CD? Well, I'm
not an expert for this, but I assume that this is simply
impossible to accomplish.

And that's the way it works:

You need two hard disk partitions to do an debian install
on ARC based machines: The FAT partition already mentioned,
which is recognised by ARC, to hold linload.exe and milo.
And a (equally well small) ext2fs partition for ther kernel
and the root image (which is recognised by milo and has
not the restrictions of a FAT formatted partition).

Copy linload.exe and milo (again: the right one) to the
FAT partition. That's the place you have to point ARC to,
to find those files (usually by creating a new boot selection
in ARC).

Copy the kernel image ("linux") to the root directory of
the ext2fs partition. Extract root.tar.gz into the same
directory and move all files from debian-alpha-root dir
to the root directory of this partition (leaving
debian-alpha-root empty).

Now either choose to set OSLOADOPTIONS in your newly created
ARC boot selection to `boot sdb8:/linux root=/dev/sdb8´
(note that this is an example, I just used /dev/sdb8 as the
ext2fs partition for that purpose) or to type this command
directly at the milo prompt.

Good luck,
Stefan Schroepfer