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Re: Booting to floppy



On Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 08:21:18PM -0800, Andrew Sharp wrote:
> 
> I've never needed rescue.bin for that.  Granted I've only done two
> installs.  ~:^)  But there are two images called driver-1.bin and
> driver-2.bin which one might guess have drivers on them.  Never used
> those either.

every install i have done on intel, powerpc and sparc has required
rescue.bin and drivers.tgz.  driver-1.bin is drivers.tgz split into 3
or 4 floppies.  you either use the split floppies or the single
tarball.  but rescue.bin has always been required unless you skip the
kernel install step.  (which won't make for a bootable system)  

> Well, no, actually.  It boots up to a lilo prompt from which you can
> mount your hard disk's root directory and like that.

syslinux actually.  and it can take a root= argument but if you don't
give a root= argument you get a root disk prompt.  

> There are two floppy images in the powerpc dist that might be
> mentioned.  One is called rescue.bin, the other boot-floppy-hfs.img,
> and hence a newbie might easily think that the former is the rescue
> floppy mentioned often in the docs, but is not bootable on old world
> macs, it is an ext2 file system, actually.  Maybe not bootable on
> any macs since people keep saying that newworld macs don't have
> floppy.  Maybe they work on some other powerpc platforms, I don't
> know.

rescue.bin is not bootable on anything.  about the only thoeretical
way to make it bootable is by installing quik on the floppy, but i
rather doubt that would work.  the only reason there is a rescue.bin
is becuase dbootstrap expects it for the kernel installation step.
and as we all know the bootfloppies code sucks balls, its simpler to
just make a bogus rescue.bin then to fsck around to kludge it into
using a hfs image.  debian-installer should/hopefully/will have a
cleaner method to deal with these cross archetecture isses.

> Uh, okay. I'm trying to see if I can build one with 2.2.18 that
> works.  It may be a few days, however, as my fastest mac isn't
> fast.  Maybe I should create a cross compile gcc on my x86
> laptop....

building a cross compiler will take longer then recompiling the boot
floppies a hundred times on a 7200 ;-)  (well unless your a compiler
god maybe) 

i haven't heard anything particularly hopefull about the hfs boot
floppy, since Dan nor the top tier powerpc kernel hackers have any
idea whats wrong...  still i hope it gets worked out, being able to
install debian on a macos free oldworld is quite valuable. 

just my crazy suggestion, if you can't get the keyboard to work right
for the rootdisk prompt, what about changing it to wait 10 or 15
seconds for a rootdisk insertion and then continuing?  would that be
difficult/messy to implement?

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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