Debian 3.0 -- Sony CDU-31a Bug
I'm a newbie to Linux but have used other flavours of UNIX before (but only
as a user). I recently acquired a copy of Debian 3.0 and want to dedicate
one of my prehistoric PCs for it -- a 486 DX-4 to be more precise with a
Sony CDU-31a CD-ROM drive.
To start with I booted into DOS using a DOS boot disk with DOS drivers from
my CD-ROM drive. So far so good.
I then ran the installation bat file in the install directory on the CD-ROM.
I soon discovered that this was no good since the this did not give me
access to the CD-ROM once Linux had booted, so I couldn't continue the
installer this way.
Next step I decide was going to be to write some boot disks. I then noticed
that there are a heap of different boot disk images but I managed to sort
out a four-disk 1.44-set that got the installer up and running.
Now the fun started. First of all I managed to locate the cdu31a driver for
my CD-ROM, but when it asked me for its parameters (which I had previously
written down) I could not seem to get things working simply because I didn't
realise that 340 (the port address) could not be written as 0340 or 340 but
had to be written down using the 0x hex notation. It would have been nice if
the example had hinted towards this.
Anyway, I managed to get the driver to install, but when it came to install
the base packages, the installer simply couldn't mount my CD-ROM.
To sort this out I shelled out onto the RAM drive and dug around until I
found that the \dev\cdu31 device had been renamed to \dev\sony!!! I figured
this out by listing the \dev\cdrom and finding that it pointed (well,
"ls -la" displayed "->") at \dev\cdu31 that did not exists! So, not knowing
much about file links under Linux, I did the next best thing, I copied
\dev\sony as \dev\cdu31 and exited the shell session.
This is I believe is a bug with the Debian boot disks (but it could be
common to other distros as well, but I wouldn't know).
When I now tried to install the base packages, the installer could continue.
However, the installer later failed with some error and the return code 1.
This will be my next battle...
While I'm at it. I have an old BIOS (surprise, surprise) and it does, as you
may know, not recognise large disks. However, I'm trying to use the drive
that came with it, a 540MB drive, and I have partitioned it like this:
1: 5MB \boot
2: 50MB \swap
3: 50MB \root
4: 435MB \root\usr
Although I've written 1 to the start of the disk (as suggested by the
installer and HOWTOs), Lilo still cannot install. The installer suggests
that the reason for this is due to the large disk-syndrome that you one can
experience under old BIOSes. However, I have followed all there is regarding
this and still things don't work out.
One thing that I'm confused about with regards to partitions is what type
they are meant to be -- primary or logical? I just can't seem to find
anything on this topic...
-Andreas
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