Hurd on my i486 won't boot
This was originally private mail to Marcus Brinkmann, who suggested that I
should send it on to the list. I'm not on the list and can't find
instructions on how to join it, so (apologies in advance) replies by mail,
please. I'd really like to try this thing out!
Basically, I've created a partition with mke2fs -o hurd /dev/hda3 under
Linux and tar xvzpf'd gnu-19990104.tar.gz into it. I'm using a GRUB 0.5 boot
floppy.
I then do:
root=(hd0,2)
kernel=/boot/gnumach root=hd0s3 -s
module=/boot/serverboot
boot
> > After this, my Num Lock light goes off and everything freezes; it doesn't
> > try to read from the hard disk.
> Mmmh. If you experience more troubles, we need to investigate closer :)
> Maybe there is more happening.
As Marcus said, and as I expected, it should show some kernel messages.
Instead, it freezes; no hard disk or floppy activity, the Num Lock light
goes out, and Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't do anything.
My machine is a DECpc-badged Intel 486sx25 with 8Mb of RAM, and two IDE hard
disks: a 200Mb IBM drive and a 500Mb Quantum Fireball (master and slave on
the primary interface). The only slightly weird thing about this machine is
that the BIOS (which announces itself as "Resident Diagnostics") doesn't
have a built-in setup program, and I didn't inherit one with it, so it
doesn't "believe in" the 500Mb drive, and only thinks it's got 4Mb of RAM.
(GRUB detects the full 8Mb.) It boots Linux quite happily (in fact, it was
my main machine until last November).
I'd really like to get that machine running Hurd. Please feel free to mail
me if you have any ideas!
--
Adam Sampson
azz@josstix.demon.co.uk
Reply to: