Re: booting on a microway alpha box
I just wanted to thank everyone here for their help. I finally got it:
boot hdb:/boot/linux root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1
I boot the kernel from the CD and the boot disk off floppy... I suspect
I could do the whoel thing from CD if I give it the path to the root
image. I will try that sometime, but I wanted to put this into the mail
list so that if anyone else went searching for it in the future they
would find this email.
thanks everyone..
doug
On Fri, 2002-07-26 at 03:29, Goswin Brederlow wrote:
> Jon Leonard <jleonard@slimy.com> writes:
>
> > On Wed, Jul 24, 2002 at 01:47:27PM -0500, Douglas Fils wrote:
> > [ Snip: continued problems booting alphas off CDROMs ]
> >
> > > Question:
> > > I should be able to boot into Debian from the CD (disk 1) correct?
> > >
> > > thansk for everyones help and time with this..
> > > I'm really hoping to wipe all our alpha machines to debian 3.0, (we have
> > > about 30+ of these beasts and they are running old RH 6.2)
> >
> > Maybe it'd be easier to accomplish that goal differently. (That, and I'm
> > out of ideas on how to make it work. It looks like SRM may be able to
> > boot from CD, but that doesn't work with MILO.)
>
> srm boots aboot normaly but it can boot milo too.
>
> But if you have problems heres another method:
>
> Since you have RH installed you already have partitions and a
> bootloader in place. You most likely also have a swap partition.
>
> - Copy the debian kernel next to your redhat one.
> - gunzip the root.bin and copy that onto the swap partition (swapoff first)
> - add a boot entry for the debian kernel with root=/dev/<your swap>
> - reboot
>
> That should give you the debian installer and access to the cdrom and
> network and from there on everything goes by the docs. Only difference
> is that you need to reboot if you repartition your harddrive, since
> linux won't reread the partition table of a used drive.
>
> Alternativey to using the swap partition you can use a zip or mo disk
> or a spare drive, but one doesn't allways have that around.
>
> > It's possible to do a Debian install from an existing unix or Linux system,
> > which is how I wound up migrating from Redhat to Debian Slink. Apparently
> > the process is better supported now, and documented under:
> >
> > http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/alpha/ch-preparing.en.html#s-linux-upgrade
> >
> > In particular, the section starting:
> > 3.7 Installing Debian GNU/Linux from a Unix/Linux System
> >
> > The basic idea is to make disk partitions (at least one) and untar
> > debootstrap into it, then boot with that as the root filesystem.
> >
> > It might also be easier to clone hard disks after you have one system up,
> > saving the effort of doing the common part of the configuration repeatedly.
> >
> > Does that look viable for you?
>
> Theres a package just for that, hopefully thats mentioned in the above
> url. Its called "debootstrap" and should also work on non-debian
> system. It sets up a complete chroot for you which can be converted to
> a real systems with a few adjustments, like adding a /etc/fstab,
> setting the hostname and such.
>
> MfG
> Goswin
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