Re: Booting to floppy
Ethan Benson wrote:
>
> On Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 08:21:18PM -0800, Andrew Sharp wrote:
> >
> > I've never needed rescue.bin for that. Granted I've only done two
> > installs. ~:^) But there are two images called driver-1.bin and
> > driver-2.bin which one might guess have drivers on them. Never used
> > those either.
Make that 2 installs on powerpc.
> every install i have done on intel, powerpc and sparc has required
> rescue.bin and drivers.tgz. driver-1.bin is drivers.tgz split into 3
> or 4 floppies. you either use the split floppies or the single
> tarball. but rescue.bin has always been required unless you skip the
> kernel install step. (which won't make for a bootable system)
Somebody else pointed out the obvious, which is that I've not done a
floppy-only install for many years, so it is using the images/files
off the cdrom, so technically I am using those floppies.
>
> > Well, no, actually. It boots up to a lilo prompt from which you can
> > mount your hard disk's root directory and like that.
>
> syslinux actually. and it can take a root= argument but if you don't
> give a root= argument you get a root disk prompt.
Yeah, that's what I said/meant. The boot-floppy-hfs.img floppy
doesn't work the same way as the rescue floppy does for other
architectures. My point is that for powerpc, the "rescue" function
of the floppy with the word "rescue" in it's image file name is
somewhat impotent. This can be somewhat confusing if you're not a
graduate of the powerpc debian booting/installing gauntlet. Most
especially because of the way the generic debian install docs refer
to the rescue floppy for everything.
> > There are two floppy images in the powerpc dist that might be
> > mentioned. One is called rescue.bin, the other boot-floppy-hfs.img,
> > and hence a newbie might easily think that the former is the rescue
> > floppy mentioned often in the docs, but is not bootable on old world
> > macs, it is an ext2 file system, actually. Maybe not bootable on
> > any macs since people keep saying that newworld macs don't have
> > floppy. Maybe they work on some other powerpc platforms, I don't
> > know.
>
> rescue.bin is not bootable on anything. about the only thoeretical
> way to make it bootable is by installing quik on the floppy, but i
> rather doubt that would work. the only reason there is a rescue.bin
> is becuase dbootstrap expects it for the kernel installation step.
> and as we all know the bootfloppies code sucks balls, its simpler to
> just make a bogus rescue.bin then to fsck around to kludge it into
> using a hfs image. debian-installer should/hopefully/will have a
> cleaner method to deal with these cross archetecture isses.
>
> > Uh, okay. I'm trying to see if I can build one with 2.2.18 that
> > works. It may be a few days, however, as my fastest mac isn't
> > fast. Maybe I should create a cross compile gcc on my x86
> > laptop....
>
> building a cross compiler will take longer then recompiling the boot
> floppies a hundred times on a 7200 ;-) (well unless your a compiler
> god maybe)
Wha? It takes the same amount of time to build a cross gcc as a
native on my machine, namely about 30 minutes. Maybe you're
thinking of other things that might be required, like libraries and
such. That might take a while. ~:^)
And I finally [duh] figured out how to make the floppies in a
reasonable amount of time: instead of make release, make build,
which leaves out the docs. phew.
> i haven't heard anything particularly hopefull about the hfs boot
> floppy, since Dan nor the top tier powerpc kernel hackers have any
> idea whats wrong... still i hope it gets worked out, being able to
> install debian on a macos free oldworld is quite valuable.
indeed.
> > just my crazy suggestion, if you can't get the keyboard to work right
> for the rootdisk prompt, what about changing it to wait 10 or 15
> seconds for a rootdisk insertion and then continuing? would that be
> difficult/messy to implement?
Why does this sound way too easy? I'm gonna have to check that
out. The other thing is that theoretically, we should be able to
get the hardware to tell us that a floppy has been inserted.
Possibly only on mac hardware, but hey. Or we could just poll the
drive or something. Hmmm, lots of crazy ideas...
a
Reply to: