new alpha installation

[Guenter Geiger <geiger@iem.mhsg.ac.at>]

Jesse Goldman writes:
 > Hi,
 > 
 > I was having trouble getting debian to boot on a new alpha machine
 > yesterday. I've been playing around with it some and I'd like to make the
 > question more specific. I read the MILO manual and the debian nano-HOWTO
 > for installation and followed the instructions. When I try to boot the
 > machine from a rescue disk via MILO, ie:
 > 
 > boot fd0:/vmlinux.gz root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1
 > 
 > MILO finds the scsi devices and then apparently tries to read the floppy
 > drive and fails spectacularly regardless of what rescue or kernel disk I
 > put there. I get errors like:
 > 
 > "VFS: Disk change detected on 2:00"
 > 
 > "Could not read filesystem on floppy0"
 > 
 > usually followed by a long list of numbers and errors which repeats 4 or 5
 > times before I get the MILO prompt back again. At that points, I have to
 > reboot since the system won't reliquish the disk drive. The loader says
 > that the system is an "AlphaPC 164LX" and Linux says in /proc/cpuinfo
 > that the cpu type is "EB164" and the system variation is "LX164". The
 > rescue floppies I've tried so far are the "multia" and "noname" but it
 > doesn't look to me like MILO even gets to the kernel on the floppy. Does
 > anyone know what I might be doing wrong? Thanks...
 > 
 > Jesse Goldman
 > 


 First of all, use the pc164 rescue disk. On a running system you can
 mount the rescue disk as ext2 filesystem. If this works with your
 floppy, and there is a vmlinux.gz on it .... (but thats probably what
 you already tried)
 You can put the pc164 kernel from 1997-10-05 disks directory on it, 
 replacing vmlinux.gz.

 But anyway, here's a short describtion what I did a few month ago ..


----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi all !!

In order to help in developing  the Debian Alpha nano-HOWTO into a
mini HOWTO some booting instructions for AlphaPC164 and ARC console.


In fact most of the instructions are form the Alpha Miniloader HOWTO


If you have the correct disks (PC164 in my case) the only difference
in the process is getting MILO to boot ...
 

ARC understands DOS filesystems and needs the linloade.exe file.
So you have to put milo and linload.exe on a DOS disk.



1) At the boot menu step into

  Supplementary menu.. 
          -> Set up the system
                   -> Manage boot selection menu...
                            -> Add a boot selection                                         
2) There you have to choose "Floppy Disk 0" as boot partition
  and choose linload.exe as osloader directory and name

3) Say "yes" to operating system and osloader being on the same
partition.

4) Enter "\" as os root directory
   Say "no" to initialize debugger at boot time.

5) Back in the "Boot selections menu" choose 
   "Change a boot selection"

6) Edit your new boot selection and set
   OSLOADFILENAME to your MILO image  e.g. "milo"

7) Save the changes you made.


Insert your MILO and loadlin.exe disk. Now you can boot MILO with your
newly created boot selection.
>From now on, everything should be fairly generic .... 



I was just curious if Debian/Alpha is installable without Redhat too
It looks pretty good until now. ..

Guenter




 


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