UDB potato installation
Hi!
I decided to test a 2.2 installation on a Multia, and I think
I found some pitfalls in the process:
First, the hardware details:
SCSI disk, 230MB SCSI-MO, SCSI-cdrom, 96MB RAM, 166Mhz CPU
After making the boot floppies, I tried booting from SRM. I was
booting from ARC before, so this was new for me: SRM barfed
right from the start with some kind of hardware failure and
a stack trace - ugh! The machine was booting fine before, though.
It turned out bad/old firmware which doesn't grok the MO. After
I turned it off, I got a prompt. Well, I decided not to upgrade
the firmware and switched back to ARC booting, which was working
fine as before. I think 6.8 from the installation manual is
a bit too short:
6.8. Booting from the ARC or AlphaBIOS Console
----------------------------------------------
In the OS Selection menu, set `linload.exe' as the boot loader, and
`milo' as the OS Path. Bootstrap using the newly created entry.
There should be another pointer to the MILO-howto, or even the
old description which was taken out of it, IMHO.
Afterwards, all went well until the mke2fs run (I decided to start
from scratch), I choosed to use the non-compilant filesystem (*)
and was unable to boot from that filesystem, because MILO (the old
one and the one from 2.2) couldn't read the new filesystem.
This weren't that bad, if I had known a way back! I was siting there,
with a perfect running system which couldn't boot up from it's own
root filesystem, which was mounting well.
I failed miserably to get mke2fs to write a 2.0.x compilant filesystem
manually, because I didn't found the right option - I really don't
know what I should have done at this point.
I ended up writing the filesytem with an old debian installation
disk, used that filesystem as it was, and all was well. I know
that an installation on Alpha is harder than on i386, and that
the UDB is obsolete as hell, but at (*) there should be warning
for MILO users, IMHO.
HTH,
Uli
--
Dipl. Inf. Ulrich Teichert|e-mail: Ulrich.Teichert@gmx.de
Stormweg 24 |listening to: Speed Of Life (Buzzcocks),
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