booting 2.2 from CD-ROM

[ian <ian.q@usa.net>]

I have now read the Debian 2.2 install instructions, the MILO Howto,
the BootPrompt Howto, initrd.txt in the kernel documentation directory, and
the last three months of this mailing list, in search of the answer
to the question, how do you boot an Alpha from the distribution CD-ROM?

details:

Alpha PC64 - 2M cache/64M DRAM
MILO 2.0.35 in FLASH
IDE HDD
IDE CDROM
Debian/Alpha-2.2 CD set from LinuxCentral - claims to be rev0a

There are NO hardware problems, as far as I can tell.

best guess so far, using disk 1:

  boot hdb:/boot/linux root=/dev/ram initrd=hdb:/boot/root.bin

(Note that the install instructions have nothing to say on the subject;
I got most of this from a previous post on this list. Minor variations produce
the same result.)

This finds the CD-ROM, and boots the kernel.
Things are looking good, until:

  You didn't specify the type of your ufs filesystem
  ...
  ufs_read_super: bad magic number
  Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 01:00

Where did ufs come into the picture? Isn't the root image
compressed ext2 or something? Is there some kernel parameter
you need to specify this?

Are other people successfully booting off CDs? This problem
doesn't look like it's specific to my hardware, or even to
the console firmware; what's the magic recipe?

Thanks for any info.

-- Ian


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