Hi Alexandre, Thanks for writing. It would be appreciated if you could file an installation-reports bug about your experiences, following the directions at <http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/report-template>. In the meantime, I'll try to address some of your concerns below. On Sun, May 09, 2004 at 01:09:54AM +0200, Alexandre Fayolle wrote: > I got hold of an Alphastation 500 a few days ago and I'm trying to > install Sarge on it (I thought I could maybe help testing the > installer). While I'm quite at ease with Debian on intel machines, I'm a > total newbie when it comes to Alpha machines, SRM and the like, though > I've read the SRM howto. (I should probably read it a couple more times > to get things going). > I grabbed the 5 mb cdrom iso image from > /debian/dists/testing/main/installer-alpha/current/images/ tonight, > booted, and started the installation process. > First problem was during hardware detection: sr_mod.o was not found, and > I got an error message. The cdrom-mini.iso you grabbed is not the normal way of installing; this image is essentially "netboot on a CD". The standard netinst and businesscard images (which should both contain the sr_mod.o module) can be found at <http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimage-testing/sarge_d-i/alpha/beta4/>. > Then came the time to partition the disk. I wiped of the previous > partitions for which I had no use and got / and swap on the first disk, > and /home and /var on the second disk, using ext3 everywhere. I was not > able to configure LVM, but this may be because I don't know anything > about LVM, and didn't stop to read the documentation. > Installation went fine until I had to make my system bootable, which > failed, I was told, because aboot wanted an ext2 partition. This was > discussed mentionned on this list last january, so I won't insist. It's been questioned whether aboot really needs ext2, or if ext3 works as well. I hope to do some testing of this before beta5; if anyone on this list has practical experience (one way or the other) using aboot with an ext3 /boot partition, I'd appreciate hearing about it. I also expect that beta5 of the debian-installer will be fixed to warn about the aboot/ext2 issue at the partitioning stage; this was supposed to make it into beta4, but I had a brain fart. > I got back to the partitionning step, removed the / partition, inserted > a small 2MB partition formated as ext2, not mounted at the beginning of > the disk, put back / to fit the remaining space, and relaunched the > installation of the base system which failed twice. > The first failure was "dpkg: syntax error: unknown user 'root' in > statusoverride file", and was caused by exim4. > The second error because /target/usr/bin/awk was an existing symling > on mawk and ln is not called with the -f option. This seems to indicate that you did not re-format the partitions before trying to reinstall? > I removed the statoverride file and the symlink and relaunched the > installation (twice) and finally got back to the installation of aboot > which failed again: the installer asked me on which partition the > bootloader should be installed, and proposed the only ext2 partition on > my machine, namely /dev/sda1, I sayed ok, and it failed because "bootcode > overlaps with partition #1. If you really want this, use -f1". > I read some doc, and issued manually "/target/sbin/swriteboot -f1 > /dev/scsi/host1/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /target/boot/bootlx" and this > failed because "existing disk label is corrupt. Couldn't get a valid > disk label, exiting". You don't really want this. The reason aboot gives you the option of overlapping a partition is because Tru64 partition tables traditionally have partition 3 as "whole disk", so it overlaps no matter *where* you're writing. If you use the -f option pointing at a partition that you have data on, you *will* corrupt the data on that partition. What you need to do is leave a small amount of space at the beginning of your disk, unpartitioned, where aboot will write the bootloader. For d-i, 1MB or so should be sufficient; if you plan to use aboot's rawboot option, you would need to leave more space for a kernel. It would be nice if the d-i partitioner (partman) also warned about this, but I haven't figured out yet how to detect this problem. At the very least, I intend for this to be mentioned in the install notes. Cheers, -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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