sarge & sid installer failure on r4k indy

[Meelis Roos <mroos@linux.ee>]

I have a R4600PC Indy (32M RAM) and I'm trying the new installer on it,
booting from network via bootp/tftp using netboot-boot.img.

The installer from sid (20040403) complains about umount but seems
continue somewhat before hanging:

RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
Freeing initrd memory: 1804k freed
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 88k freed
Setting up filesystem, please wait ...
umount: /initrd: Invalid argument

Then it waits for quite some seconds. Sometimes it doesn't proceed
anywhere, sometimes it proceeds with the install and hangs in different
places (before language chooser, 71% of hardware detection, after
setting the hostname).

The installer from sarge (20040308 - an older one so this is probably
uninportant) complains about missing console:

RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
Freeing initrd memory: 1748k freed
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 88k freed
Warning: unable to open an initial console.
Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!

I switched it to the serial console via setenv console d, now it
complained the same it to the serial console, with or without
console=ttyS0,9600 parameter.

The installer from woody (current tftpboot.img) works fine, I tested
full install.

About possible harware failures: IRIX 6.2 and Debian Woody run fine. But
when I have keyboard unplugged and using serial console, I get these 2
lines on power-on:

Data path test                             *FAILED*
        RTC path test                      *FAILED*

It probably means that the clock battery is dead (the clock is mostly
right, difference 9 minutes for a long time with no NTP) but maybe they
are somewhat important.

-- 
Meelis Roos (mroos@linux.ee)