Re: booting on a microway alpha box
On Tue, Jul 23, 2002 at 04:23:35PM -0500, Douglas Fils wrote:
> Jon,
> This is puzzling now...
>
> you right, I look at my CD on another linux box and I see:
> palc0:/mnt/cdrom> ls
> apb dedication.txt etc milo README.mirrors.html README.txt
> upgrade
> boot dists install pics README.mirrors.txt tools
> debian doc md5sum.txt README.html README.non-US TRANS.TBL
>
> this isn't even a valid bootabel CD to install from from what I can see.
Bootable CDs have a different structure that bootable hard disks; on x86
they have a short section that's not usually visible that gets treated as
a floppy. I presume things are similar for bootable Alpha CDs, but I don't
actually know.
> I am using disk 1 of the Debian 2.2r7 Alpha disk series. Is this not
> what I am supposed to use, or do I require making a boot floppy to load
> this from?
That should work, though were I starting today I'd probably get 3.0 disks.
I poked around a bit, and found some relevant documentation:
http://www.debian.org/releases/potato/alpha/ch-rescue-boot.en.html#s-boot-troubleshooting
6.9 Booting with MILO
To bootstrap the installation system, enter the following command at
the MILO prompt:
MILO> boot fd0:linux.gz root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1
If you are booting from something other than a floppy, substitute fd0
in the above example with the appropriate device name in Linux
notation. The help command would give you a brief MILO command
reference.
So it sounds like the extra bit you need is load_ramdisk=1. For some
reason I'd assumed that hdb was a hard disk, and you were running into
trouble later in the install sequence. (Possibly because I did my RedHat->
Debian conversion without using a CD.)
So I'd try (if you haven't yet):
boot hdb0:boot/linux root=/dev/hdb0 load_ramdisk=1
> I just made a root floppy from the CD and used
>
> boot hdb0:/boot/linux root=/dev/fd0
>
> it boot the kernel, tells me to put in my floppy disk and then it reads
> it and then fails on error:
> "efs_read_super: bad magic number"
> complaining that I have not set a UFS type.
That's probably a sign that you didn't put a ext2 filesystem on the floppy
disk, but that's probably not what you want to do anyway.
> I should, however, be able to boot directly from CD to do the install
> shouldn't I?
I think so. The documentation implies that it works.
> - are the debian alpha CD's not actually able to boot from CD?
> - do I always require a floppy or some other device to boot from?
>
> doug
Jon Leonard
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