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Re: PReP booting



Sven Luther wrote: 
On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 12:49:06PM -0500, Greg Trigg wrote:
  
Hermann Kaiser wrote:

    
On Aug 15, 2007, at 4:19 PM, Greg Trigg wrote:

      
Which RS6000 model is this ? a PReP one or a CHRP one ?

          
It is a 44P-170.  I'm 90% positive it's a PReP model.  It's power3.
        
A 7044P170 is definitely a CHRP machine. Power3 is 64 Bit and all of  
them are CHRP.
      
Whoops!  Well, that could be a problem.<understatement>

I guess I better install yaboot.  I feel like I'm close.  Anyways, I'm 
making progress and that's far better than being stuck with a mis 
configured AIX system.  Thanks for that valuable bit of information. One 
step closer.
    
If you provide the kernel patches or configuration you applied, we could
aply them to the debian kernel, and provide a working d-i, which will do
all this all by itself.
Well, I don't know how it was modified, but the first step was an install cd that would actually boot.  Somehow the one at http://www.ifh.ee.ethz.ch/~rharbers/rs6000/rs6000.html booted into Ram without trying to look for a hard drive.  My RS/6000's use scsi hard drives, so I'm assuming that the scsi driver needs to be compiled in rather than being a module.  I wasn't able to access the discs until I downloaded and inserted the scsi module.  My main difficulty with any install cd of any distro is that the computer locks up the moment it tries to load the kernel.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to know, but I think that if the scsi driver was in the kernel rather than a module, it's possible that would solve most of my problems. 

Also, as stated in the how-to that I linked to, I did have to remove the AIX label from the hard drive:

dd if=/dev/discs/disc0/disc bs=512 count=1 of=sector0.save
cp sector0.save tmpfile
dd if=/dev/zero of=tmpfile count=4 bs=512
dd if=tmpfile of= /dev/discs/disc0/disc bs=512 count=1

Those are the main things that got me going.  The rest of it was just downloading and installing udebs until I could do things like partition the hard disk, format the linux partitions, mount everything and run the debootstrap command.  I deviated where I had to to get where I am, but I think most of that was due to the age of the installer and the fact that Sarge isn't "stable" anymore.

Concerning your other question, it's hard for me to know if it's a bug and I don't know how or where to submit a bug report.  I guess I should have tried, though. 

I hope that I've supplied enough information.  If I need to submit a bug report, I'd be happy to.

Thanks,
Greg
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