AlphaBIOS warning
Hi there,
I wanted to test the newest MILO for Miata from Nikita. So I got it
and downloaded it and tried it. It didn't work (or I didn't configure
it right or whatever): it just coughed up a message "Type <dev>: to
select ..." and went dead (in particular I was not allowed to type
anything). "No sweat", thinks I, just go back to a floppy with the
original MILO and rename the copy MILOSAFE to MILO and all is well. I
even have an AlphaBIOS floppy selection from the old days sitting
there, and a floppy with the two files MILO and LINLOAD.EXE as I'm
supposed to...
Oops, no dice. AlphaBIOS insisted on rejecting the old FLOPPY disk
selection as invalid!
The problem, I think, is that there is no Windows partition on the
disk at all - just the stupid 10M dos fat partition with MILO (new and
bogus) and MILOSAFE and the linux kernels. So AlphaBIOS checked that
the OS disk is there which it isn't. Damn NT-centricism :(
This may happen to you, too!
Here is the way to get MILO back when AlphaBIOS barfs...it took me a
while to figure it out so maybe it should go into the nano-HOWTO.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
How to get MILO back if it is corrupted on an AlphaBIOS DOS partition
(as done by Kristoffer on a Miata aka PWS 500a with SCSI disk):
Enter AlphaBIOS setup and select CMOS setup, F6 (advanced), and
Console->Digital Unix (SRM), F10, F10 (save). If you need to check
up on the MILO boot command line then do it now (I did).
Cold-reboot to get the SRM >>> prompt.
Type the falsity
>>> set os_type nt
so that the next boot will be a normal AlphaBIOS one.
Go somewhere else and make a rawrite/dd of a MILO for your machine
onto a floppy.
Put the floppy in the drive and boot from the SRM prompt:
>>> boot dva0
Now you should get back a MILO prompt so you can boot properly with
the MILO command line you normally use, for me it is:
MILO> boot sda1:vmlinuz root=/dev/sda3
Once Linux is back up you can mount the DOS partition used by
AlphaBIOS (sda1 in my case) and recreate the MILO file properly.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I would have liked this to not happen!
So: what is the state of the "new" MILO documentation, i.e., could I
have avoided all these problems with just the right magic in the
AlphaBIOS setup?
Is there yet another firmware update that makes this not happen?
Sighs,
Kristoffer
PS. I just remembered another similar trick I pulled once where I had
a CD-ROM available: set the OS selection disk to CD: and put a CD in
the drive to fool AlphaBIOS that there is NT on the CD so it
continues. I wonder if that works?
--
Kristoffer Høgsbro Rose, Ph.D., prof.associé <Kristoffer.Rose@ENS-Lyon.FR>
Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme équipe PLUME, bureau LR5-026
Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon; 46, Allée d'Italie; F-69364 Lyon 07 cedex
phone: +33(0)4 7272 8642; fax:...8080 <http://www.ens-lyon.fr/~krisrose>
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