Stefan,
Make sure the BGM/FAT partition is less or equal 128 MB in size - the logical sector size may not exceed the kernel page size of 4k.Why this? Falcon has Tos 4.04 and allows than 128MB partitions iirc. I always use 500 MB for my first TOS partition.
Limitation of the Linux VFAT filesystem since kernel version 2.6, related to changes in the filesystem core code that reqiure the logical sector size to not exceed the MMU page size. If you can generate a TOS filesystem that satisfies this condition, it might be fine. I've never tried hard enough to succeed.
Is it possible to make this partition scheme with HD Driver under TOS?That's about the only way I know of.Okay, i did this. Then i used FreeMiNT to make an ext2 FS on the LNX partition.The kernel boot messages tell me it mounted /dev/hda4 successfully as ext2 .
Good. Why not use FreeMINT to unpack the linux filesystem image tarball?
Without byte swappping by device mapper, using ARAnyM might be the easiest option: Get the disk partitioned under TOS, then use ARAnyM on a PC to mountyour partition and bootstrap a Debian system on to the mounted partition (use ByteSwap=no, Path=/dev/sdb or Path=/dev/hdb to get ARAnyM to mountyour Falcon disk attached as disk sdb or hdb - make sure you calculate the correct number of logical cylinders from the disk size). It may be necessary to use the nfhdXXX devices instead of the hdXXX ones depending on your version of ARAnyM.I will need some time to learn about how to use aranym. I have it installed, but just added pre made disk images. I currently have no idea how to make sure i calculate the cylinder numbers correctly. Isn't this something i can write down somewhere from the Atari?
You may be able to use the disk geometry shown in TOS - i.e. change number of cylinders. heads, and sectors per track in ARAnyM to match that. I've always kept heads and sectors per track unchanged and scaled cylinders accordingly.
Cheers, Michael
Greets, Stefan