Bug#274516: [powerpc] [pre-rc2] [floppy] oldworld ppc 7300 failure
On Saturday, October 2, 2004, at 08:24 AM, Fabian Linzberger wrote:
detailed diagnosis:
floppy/boot.img:
bootloader seems to work fine, soon as the penguin logo and the linux
bootmessages should come up, display is completely garbled.
floppy/ofonlyboot.img:
bootloader seems to work fine, penguin logo comes up in green colors,
no further output.
floppy-2.4/boot.img, floppy-2.4/ofonlyboot.img
nice little penguin/monitor logo comes up, but is soon crossed out
in red...
Hi!
The "crossed out in red" you are getting for the 2.4 boot floppies
("floppy-2.4/*boot.img") usually means that the boot loader got
some kind of error when reading the kernel image off the floppy.
Your experience with the 2.6 boot floppies ("floppy/*boot.img") is
consistent with my own results on a beige G3 mini-tower and a
powerMac 6500/225.
However, I am able to get the 2.4 boot floppy (but not the 2.4
ofonlyboot floppy) to load and run its kernel on both of my test
machines.
So I suspect you are running up against I/O errors in reading the
boot floppy. This is a common problem. The firmware floppy driver
is not very tolerant of minor errors that would be recoverable with
a more sophisticated driver.
Two suggestions:
1) Invest in a floppy drive cleaning kit. Don't be afraid to clean
your drive a couple of times if it's been unused for a long time.
There can be a lot of dust accumulated inside.
2) Here's the script I use to write the floppy images. Reading
back the floppy with "cmp" gives me some confidence that the write
was successful.
#!/bin/bash -p
for II in "$@"
do
echo
ls -l "$II"
echo 'insert floppy now, please'
read dummy # pause til user hits <cr>
dd if="$II" of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024
sync
cmp /dev/fd0 "$II"
eject /dev/fd0
JJ="$(basename $II '.img')"
echo "Please label as $JJ"
done
It's invoked as (for example):
makefloppy boot.img root.img net-drivers.img
Enjoy!
Rick
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