Re: Help needed with Sparcstation 20
On Friday 26 Dec 2003 10:03 pm, mark acierno wrote:
> Hello all, I just acquired a Sparcstation 20 Dual Ross 100 mhz 384MB. The
> unit came with a 4.5 and 2.1M drive as well as a copy of "red hat" linux
> (5.2) on CDrom. I partitioned the drives as follows:
>
> when I install "red hat" all goes well until it is time to boot the system
> then I get an error the the
> boot device: / iommu/sbus/espdma@f,400000/esp@f,800000/sd@3,0 File and
> args: The file just loaded does not appear to be executable.
>
I can guess at what the problem could be. It looks like you are possibly
trying to boot from the wrong disk, but this isn't your fault.
When a Sun machine has two hard disks, the first is given SCSI ID 3 and the
second is given ID 1. So the machine by default tries to boot from the first
disk on ID 3. You can see that this is what the machine is trying to do from
the output you provided.
Now, Linux does something which would normally be sensible, but on Sun
hardware is just confusing. It names the drives according to their ID. So the
drive on ID 1, which is the machine's second drive, becomes sda and Linux's
first drive. The disk on ID 3, which is the machine's first drive, becomes
sdb and Linux's second drive.
The installer will only try to install the boot loader on Linux's first drive,
which is not the one the machine normally boots from. This has driven me mad
in the past.
There are two possible ways to get around this: -
1. Boot into your system using a rescue disk, edit your silo.conf so that the
bootloader is installed onto sdb, then run silo to install the bootloader.
2. Change the device that the machine tries to boot. From the OK prompt, you
can type: -
setenv boot-device / iommu/sbus/espdma@f,400000/esp@f,800000/sd@1,0
The easiest solution is the second one, but the first is the "proper" way to
do it. Hopefully, if I have guessed the problem correctly, doing either of
the above will solve the problem.
And just to add further confusion: You don't actually need any whole disk
partitions if you only intend to run Linux on the machine (which you do) and
not a dual-boot combination of Linux and Solaris.
I hope some of this helps :-)
Regards,
David.
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