Re: Successfull Etch install on a Multia

["Duncan Kennington" <duncan.kennington@gmail.com>]

On 01/03/07, Ted S. Letofsky <tletofsky@netechnica.com> wrote:

> After months of not touching it, seeing the listserve alive with content
> regarding the Multia has caused me to pull mine back out and attempt a
> clean boot and install of my own.

Motivation for me also!

> I continue to have issues that I saw a while ago.
>
> When I reach the point where aboot starts, the machine hangs at the
> following.
> "aboot: starting kernel boot/vmlinuz with arguements ramdisk_size=16384
> root=/dev/ram devfs=mount,dall"
>
> the version of SRM I am running is BL5 V3.8-3 Aug 10 1995

I had the same problem, but listened and watched and eventually saw
the keyboard lights flash and heard the HDD being accessed.  I think
it's been mentioned in other threads, but not clearly, but if you get
this far, it IS booting, but you can't see it, because the install
kernel doesn't support TGA framebufffer for console.

I had to rustle up a null modem cable and ran

> > > boot dka400 -fl 1

Where dka400 is my CDROM with the etch-netinst.iso.  Flags 1 puts the
console on ttyS0, at 9600,N81.

Fiddling a bit with the VT100 settings in Hyperterminal (my laptop has
only windows), I finally got the installer up.

The install took AGES (two days, but that's with me going to work and
bed between answering questions).

Once installed, I installed SSH and now run it headless.

Will be interested to hear if the serial console works for you too.

Regards,
Duncan