On Tuesday, October 26, 2004, at 03:18 AM, Hans Ekbrand wrote:
After finishing the installation and rebooting, nothing happaned. The monitor warned "Check the signal cable".Since the boot floppy worked alright, I would like to use it to boot the final system, instead of booting from hard disk. Is that supported? If not, any hints on how to do it?
As I've said before, if you can afford the disk space (big IDE disks are cheap) the boot loader that I suggest as being most robust and flexible is MacOS with BootX.
That said, if you really want to boot from floppy, you can use the install "boot" floppy, but you will need to construct your own "root" floppy that is aware of the location of your real root filesystem on the hard disk. It should load whatever modules are required for your hardware then perform a pivot_root operation to the real root.
If you use the install "boot" floppy you will have to live with the kernel that's on that floppy, the "2.4.27-powerpc-small", which has *everything* possible as modules, to keep down size so it will fit on a 1.4 MB floppy. If you get it to work, I'd suggest you try building your own customized kernel as your first project. Maybe you can get a kernel with an optimized set of drivers built-in that will still fit on a floppy. It's worth a try!
Have fun! Rick