Installing aboot ?
Does anyone have any pointers for installing the bootloader in alpha?
I'm pretty familiar with changing the master bootrecord on intel disks,
and grub and lilo, and I've read the man pages and /usr/share/docs and
googled on aboot, but I'm obviously doing something wrong.
I got one basic small install running on my multia's internal 340mb
scsi, and then used debootstrap to install it again on an external 1.8gb
drive. I know that in previous alpha installs, you had to leave the
first couple of cylinders of the drive free for aboot. In the etch
install, however, it actually creates a partition there that you can see
with fdisk, and, with the regular install, it puts aboot in there okay,
and it boots.
With the debootstrap install, however, you have to do that manually,
and it isn't working. I made a 2mb partition on the beginning of the
drive for aboot, didn't format it, and then I do "swriteboot /dev/sdb
bootlx". If I do that from anwhere but the /boot dir, it doesn't work
because it apparantly needs to use the copy of bootlx there. If I try
to do it from inside the chroot, if doesn't work because it can't see
the drive really, just like you can't fdisk from in the chroot.
And, swriteboot complains about the aboot partition, saying that it
will overlap that partition, so you have to use the "-f1" switch to make
it override that. Then it looks like it installs the bootloader okay,
but it won't boot. So I tried deleting that partion wit fdisk, and
running swriteboot again, but it's the same thing, even after a reboot,
claims that it will overlap the partition.
And also I'm wondering if I'm using the wrong bootlx -- are they
created especially for each install? I wouldn't think so, since you can
change kernels AFAIK and not have to rerun swriteboot.
--
Harmon Seaver
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