how to install etch on PC164

[donald daniel <donald.daniel@sbcglobal.net>]

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I will tell how I successfully installed etch on an
"impossible" system.

I have a 1997 alpha PC164 with IDE drive, cdrom, floppy,
NE2000 ethernet card. The SRM command "show dev" lists bootable
devices: only the floppy and the IDE device connected to the
outer IDE header, J14, IDE drive 0/1 connector.  Not listed is
the device connected to the other IDE header, J13, IDE drive
2/3 connector.  The ethernet card is not listed as a bootable
device either.

I put the CDROM on the bootable IDE header and the hard drive
on the other. I was then easily able to install using Debian
Etch 4.0r3 netinst CD. I only installed the standard system,
not the desktop, since I only have 128 MB ram, equivalent to
64 MB on a 32 bit machine. aboot was automatically installed.

I then reversed the IDE cables so the hard drive was on the
bootable header.  The SRM command "boot dqa0" worked, loading
the kernel, but the boot stalled at the following point:

Begin: mounting root file system
Begin: running /scripts/local-top
ide2: I/O resource 0x3EE-0x3EE not free
ide2: ports already in use, skipping probe
done
Begin: waiting for root file system

after four minutes of this:

Check root= bootarg cat /proc/cmdline
or missing modules, devices: cat /proc/modules ls /dev
ALERT! /dev/hdc3 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!
..
..
(initramfs)

We are now in a shell, so we proceed.  During install
the default partition scheme was:

#1 aboot
#2 ext2 /boot
#3 ext3 /
#4 swap

If we do "ls" we see no vmlinuz, no /boot. We are in
ramdisk, not on hard disk.

We do:

mount /dev/hda3 /root
chroot /root /bin/bash
(now we are superuser, "ls" shows hard disk)
#mount /dev/hda2 /boot
cd boot/etc
vi aboot.conf
(we change "hdc" to "hda")
sync
cd /etc
vi fstab
(we change "hdc" to "hda" and "hda" to "hdc")
sync
(we cannot shutdown to reboot, we use ctrl-alt-del)

Now "boot dqa0" boots the system correctly.
There are two copies of aboot.conf, apparently only
the one in /boot/etc is used, the one in /etc is
ignored.