Re: Debian Installer - boot floppies
On Sat, Feb 25, 2006 at 11:38:55PM +0800, Tomasz Grzegurzko wrote:
> Hi Sven,
>
> I've been trying to coax the floppy images from
> http://people.debian.org/~luther/d-i/images/daily/powerpc/floppy/
> (where daily = 25/2/2006) to boot on a 7200/75 I've picked up. The
> system boots of the disks fine, which many of the earlier revisions of
> the images do not (the ones pointed to by the debian documentation only
> contain seemingly empty disk images, weird). Other times, I've inserted
> the boot disk and after loading it up the screen blanks and will not
> switch back on. However, my issue with the daily set from above is the
> floppy module. It seems that the module "floppy" will not load either
> from the installer or via a modprobe.
>
> # depmod -a
> # modprobe floppy
> FATAL: Error inserting floppy
> (/lib/modules/2.6.15-1-powerpc-miboot/kernel/drivers/block/floppy.ko):
> Device or resource busy
> # dmesg | tail
> register_blkdev: cannot get major 2 for fd
Ok, we need to investigate this, i am at fosdem, where i picked up a prep box
and another oldworld, and will be back home only wednesday and probably not
have time until next WE, but i will definitively try a run of those.
> Now I've tried an earlier set of disks based around
> /~luther/d-i/images/2005-11-09
> and they do not exhibit this floppy problem, but I cannot get through
> the installation as the kernel modules for critical things such as the
> ext2 file system cannot be loaded from archives as they do not exist in
> the repos for stable, testing or unstable anymore.
Ok. This means that something broke in the kernel bewteen both. do the
2005.11.09 have 2.6.14 kernels, right ?
> The unit has 40MB of ram and I am told that the system is going to
> operate in lowmem mode, which seems to affect very little. I've checked
> free at repeated points throughout and always seen ~20MB of ram free.
> The ethernet and scsi modules are mace and mac53c94, which work out of
> the older 2005-11-09 disk set but I cannot test under this later disk
> set as I can't load the modules from the floppys I've made!
>
> Also, throughout the process I've tried various other disk sets and
> notice from time to time a particular disk may break the 1.44MB barrier,
Sure, but this should be fixed now. We had a serious problem about this.
> can I safely interpret that these are problematic disk sets and should
> be avoided? I've tried to dd these disks and (as expected) run out of
Yes, they will not work at all.
> space on the target disk when using /dev/fd0 (will superformatted
> floppies work on this old mac -- unknown, but I am guessing these disks
> have some kinds of errors perhaps?).
I believe not.
> Sorry to contact you direct if the right thing to do was post on a list;
The list would have been the better place, i will CC this there.
> I'm happy for this to be repeated on whatever appropriate list for
> others to muse over. I should also mention it's entirely possible I've
> overlooked something fundamental as I will admit I only have limited
> experience in both PPC architecture and Linux/MacOS on PPC architecture,
> so messing around with the openrom firmware is something I've avoided
> doing, but perhaps this is why the process is all going pear shaped,
> although the fact that some disk sets work tends to dismiss this.
No, the powerpc oldworld miboot floppies have not worked since a long time,
and are a bit raw right now, so there is work needed to make them clean again.
I am happy to see you participating in that quest.
You should also file bug report for individual issues, the above should
probably be filled against linux-2.6, i think.
Friendly,
Sven LUther
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