Re: Alpha issues (SRM installation)
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David Huggins-Daines wrote:
>I've been doing a few things to make installing Debian on Alphas that boot
>from SRM firmware a bit more pleasant, and I'm wondering about how to
>proceed with a few things.
I just nuked AlphaBIOS from my machine in favour of SRM and reinstalled
Debian potato, so I suppose I could throw in a few comments here...
>2) dbootstrap also needs to run the correct fdisk program based on this
>detection - cfdisk cannot create OSF partition maps, so SRM machines must
>use fdisk instead. I would also like to put up a dialog box explaining that
>you need to put fdisk into disklabel mode with the 'b' command (it would be
>nice if you could simply launch fdisk in disklabel mode - I might hack it so
>that this can be done), and start the first partition at cylinder 2 rather
>than cylinder 1 to leave room for aboot.
fdisk as found on the floppies from http://koenig.isr.uni-stuttgart.de/debian
has a number of problems it would be nice to fix.
(1) it still has the bug mentioned in the SRM-HOWTO, viz, if your disk has
X cylinders, the prompt when creating a partition suggests ending it at X+1.
(2) if you create a BSD partition table, write to disk, exit fdisk and then
restart fdisk, you get a nasty message about your disk not having a DOS
partition table or a Sun or SGI disklabel and therefore not being bootable.
(3) fdisk tends to produce irrelevant x86 specific messages about DOS
partitions and large disks...
Peter Maydell
[SRM is not quite as cool as Sun OpenFirmware, but nicer than AlphaBIOS :->]
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