Floppy Installation on Sparcstation 1

[Ashok Gopalakrishnan <agopalak@ee.tamu.edu>]

Hello,

I apologize for reposting. There were no responses to my earlier
message so I thought I would try again.

I am trying to install debian on a sparcstation 1 with 16MB of RAM.
>From ftp.debian.org, in the directory
pub/debian/dists/unstable/main/disks-sparc/1998-12-07, I downloaded
the files base14-1.bin thru base14-2.bin, resc1440.bin, drv1440.bin
and root.bin. Using rawrite2, I copied these to floppies.

I then booted the sparc with the 'boot floppy' command and at the SILO
boot prompt, entered '/fd;/linux' to start the process. After
uncompressing the kernel image and detecting the hardware on the
machine, I am prompted to insert the root floppy and press enter. When
I do this however, the kernel panics, saying that it cannot mount the
root files system. Here are the exact messages:

......
Partition check:
   sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 sda5 sda6 sda7 sda8
   sdb: sdb1 sdb2 sdb3 sdb4 sdb5 sdb6 sdb7 sdb8
floppy 0: Warning disk change called early
VFS: Insert root floppy and press enter

Upon inserting the root floppy and pressing enter:

vfs_read_super: bad magic number 0xf1f9e4ad on dev 2/0
kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 2:00
Press L1-A to return to the boot prom

Now, while the release notes talk about using root1440.bin, I could
find only root.bin in the above ftp directory. Could this be a
problem? Also, while I am able to mount the resc1440 and drv1440
floppies as ext2 filesystems, I am not able to mount the root floppy
as ext2. Is this correct behaviour?

I tried with images from the 1998-03-08 amd 1998-05-25 directories,
but in those two cases, I could not even get to the SILO boot: prompt.
There were errors in reading from the etc/silo.conf file.

All suggestions appreciated.

Thanks,

Ashok
agopalak@ee.tamu.edu

Any and all help is appreciated.