Bug#264964: OldWorld PowerMac Debian-Install floppys
On Friday, August 13, 2004, at 09:53 AM, Sven Luther wrote:
Can you please retry the miboot boot floppies tomorrow ? I fixed the
daily-builds to rebuild the actual miboot floppies.
Now, the only problem remaining would be the root floppy being too
big, and
the actual 2.6 kernel based miboot floppies.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
Hi Sven!
Sorry for the delay on getting this done.
I downloaded the boot and root (and other) images from
http://people.debian.org/~luther/d-i/images/daily/powerpc-small/floppy/
See appendix 1.
After some fooling around with a dirty floppy drive and some poor
quality floppy disks (I *hate* dealing with floppy disks! The
floppy drives on Old Macs are almost invariably in poor shape.
This is one reason I strongly recommend that people use BootX
instead if they have the option.) I eventually succeeded in writing
(and verifying) the images to physical floppies.
First observation:
The root image is larger than (1474560=1440*1024) bytes, so dd gets
an error trying to write it to /dev/fd0. See appendix 2.
Second observation:
When I loop mount the root.img, all the stuff necessary for booting
seems to be there (confirmed later by actually booting off of it)
See appendix 3.
Third observation:
I booted from the boot floppy. It read the floppy, did the normal
kernel initialization stuff and finally ejected the boot floppy
with the message "Insert root floppy"..."press ENTER". Which I
did. It printed "RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0" then
read for a while then stopped reading (no noise from the floppy
drive). And it hung. I gave it several minutes. Nothing
happened. No error messages on the console -- nothing. See my
next opservation for one possible explanation of this behavior.
Fourth observation.
When I uncompress root.img and loop mount it, there is nothing
there (just a "lost+found" directory)! Where did the contents of
the initrd go? And, if it doesn't have anything in it, what excuse
is there for it being so large? See appendix 4.
Hope this helps!
Rick
===================================================
Appendix 1
Index of /~luther/d-i/images/daily/powerpc-small/floppy
Name Last modified Size Description
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Parent Directory 07-Jul-2004 00:25 -
asian-root.img 15-Aug-2004 21:06 1.2M
boot.img 15-Aug-2004 21:06 1.4M
cd-drivers.img 15-Aug-2004 21:06 1.4M
net-drivers.img 15-Aug-2004 21:06 1.4M
ofonlyboot.img 15-Aug-2004 21:06 1.4M
root.img 15-Aug-2004 21:08 1.4M
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Apache/1.3.26 Server at people.debian.org Port 80
Appendix 2
$ cd /tmp/DebianFloppys/
$ ls -lA
total 12860
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rbthomas rbthomas 1474560 Aug 16 00:10 boot.img
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rbthomas rbthomas 1467392 Aug 16 00:12 cd-drivers.img
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rbthomas rbthomas 1467392 Aug 16 00:12 net-drivers.img
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rbthomas rbthomas 1474560 Aug 16 00:13 ofonlyboot.img
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rbthomas rbthomas 1514521 Aug 16 00:10 root.img
$
Appendix 3
# cd /tmp/DebianFloppys/
# mount -t hfs -o loop boot.img /mnt/floppy/
# ls -lAR /mnt/floppy/
/mnt/floppy/:
total 1166
dr-xr--r-- 2 root root 8 Aug 16 2004 .finderinfo
dr-xr--r-- 2 root root 8 Aug 16 2004 .resource
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 300 Aug 16 2004 .rootinfo
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 16 2004 Finder
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 16 2004 System
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 1193284 Aug 16 2004 zImage
/mnt/floppy/.finderinfo:
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 300 Aug 16 2004 Finder
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 300 Aug 16 2004 System
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 300 Aug 16 2004 zImage
/mnt/floppy/.resource:
total 78
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 16 2004 Finder
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 79593 Aug 16 2004 System
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 16 2004 zImage
#
Appendix 4:
# cp root.img root.gz
# gunzip root.gz
# mount -t ext2 -o loop root /mnt/floppy
# ls -lAR /mnt/floppy
/mnt/floppy:
total 1
drwx------ 2 root root 1024 Aug 15 22:46 lost+found
/mnt/floppy/lost+found:
total 0
#
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