Having some odd issues booting anything on my axp164UX
I got a pair of axp164UX machines, which I am now trying to get debian
installed onto.
Of course they use ARCS rather than SRM, so installing is going to be
non trivial (I also got a Multia with SRM which boots the install CD
just fine, except the TGA console shows nothing, and when booted with a
serial console it dies with out of memory, which I guess is reasonable
with 32MB ram in the system).
Now supposedly woody works on the 164UX and supports installing with
milo. I grabbed the ruffian milo disk, put it on a floppy, booted it,
and then tried to get it to load the rescue disk next, but milo simply
gives an error about being unable to determine the filesystem on the
floppy (and spits on a line of text that looks a lot like the FAT12
header that would be on the rescue disk). I have tried multiple
floppies, I tried a different floppy drive, I tried other versions of
milo I found after much searching, and so far nothing works. As soon as
milo is loaded, it no longer has a clue how to read from the floppy
(even gives io errors every once in a while). Directory listings of a
FAT16 drive on hda1 work just fine.
As another experiment I tried putting milo and the install kernel and
initrd for etch onto the fat partition (by putting the drive in a PC)
and then booting that, but it seems milo has no idea how to load an
initrd, or at least not the one from etch so that didn't seem to work
either. I guess I should try putting the woody kernel onto the HD, but
then I have no idea what to do about rescue, root and drivers1/2.
Should I extract the drivers tgz onto the hd as well along with the
contents of the root disk onto a small ext2 partition and then point
milo at the woody install kernel and the small ext2 partition?
I found a page that says that etch should still run on a machine booted
with milo as long as you have your own way of getting milo on there and
configured, so I figure there is still hope here. With a 600MHz 21164A
and 128MB ram (which I will probably upgrade to 512MB if I get it
working), it seems like it should be at least a decent alpha box to play
with.
So any ideas? Does it seem the floppy controller is broken on this
machine or is there some configuration setting in the ARCS BIOS I have
to fiddle with to make this thing boot?
--
Len Sorensen
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