SPARC 2 floppy boot fails
Hi there!
Be gentle with me - I'm new to the debian-sparc effort..
I have just got hold of two Sparc 2s, and have (of course!) decided to try
putting debian on them. I'm using the newest boot-disks from a debian
mirror.
One of the sparcs appears to have a buggered floppy drive (it won't boot off
any disks, and fails its own floppy self-test).
The other, however, will begin to boot. Specifically, it will load SILO,
and then display the 'boot:' prompt (complaining about my boot-file
variable, which is fair enough). <TAB> tells me that the image is called
linux (so it can read silo.conf, I guess). So, I boot 'linux', and I get:
boot: linux
Read error on block 50
Cannot find /linux (Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in
short read)
Image not found... try again
Now, I would assume that the floppy was buggered. But I have rewritten the
floppy (including onto brand-new disks) and the problem persists. I would
then assume that the floppy drive was damaged (since this is quite an old
machine) - except that by browsing through the list archives, I see that
other people have had exactly the same problem (specifically on block 50).
It was mentioned that this might be a ROM problem - my ROM version is 2.4.
This is not actually going to cause me all that much problem, since I will
net-boot and net-install these machines when my transceivers arrive for
them. However, it occurs to me that this may be a debian boot-disk
problem - and if it is, I'm happy to help fix it - I can program, and I'm
even a debian developer.
Regards,
Jules
/----------------+-------------------------------+---------------------\
| Jelibean aka | jules@jellybean.co.uk | 6 Evelyn Rd |
| Jules aka | jules@debian.org | Richmond, Surrey |
| Julian Bean | jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk | TW9 2TF *UK* |
+----------------+-------------------------------+---------------------+
| War doesn't demonstrate who's right... just who's left. |
| When privacy is outlawed... only the outlaws have privacy. |
\----------------------------------------------------------------------/
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-sparc-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: