Re: boot floppies

[Eric Delaunay <delaunay@lix.polytechnique.fr>]

Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS wrote:
> Thank you, John Chapman, for telling me about the mailing list archives
> and more recent boot floppies. Now I have some different problems:
> 
> This time I took resc1440.bin, root.bin and drv1440.bin from the
> directory called 2.1.6-1999-02-02.
> 
> I discovered by random experimentation that to boot off "resc1440.bin"
> I have to type at the "ok" prompt not "boot floppy", as I read
> somewhere, but "boot floppy linux" or "boot floppy xxx". In the first
> case it warns you to back up all your discs and then proceeds to boot
> without waiting for you to press ENTER; in the second case you get a
> "boot:" prompt at which you can type "help", for example.
> 
> I think the installation instructions should explain what to type at
> the "ok" prompt. (Or is "boot floppy" supposed to work but silo.conf is
> wrong?)

Maybe, but it works at least on my SparcClassic.

> The kernel was then loaded, but it can't read the partition table from
> sda; it can't guess its capacity either. According to SunOS I have:
> 
>     sd0 at esp0 ... 3 ... 0
>     Quantum ProDrive 105S cyl 974 alt 2 hd 6 sec 35
> 
>     sd1 at esp0 ... 1 ... 0
>     QUANTUM P105SS (can't read capacity?)
> 
> I assume sd0 corresponds to Linux's sda. Is there a kernel parameter I
> can use to make Linux understand the disc?

Did you tried to partition it with fdisk ?

> When the kernel wanted me to insert the floppy with root.bin I had some
> problems because no one told me that root.bin should be copied onto a
> floppy with an ext2 file system. You should probably put a floppy image
> root1440.bin on the FTP site; this is what the installation
> instructions assume.

Or I will remove this assumption from the release notes ;-)

> Interestingly, the kernel seemed to consistently require two attempts
> to read the root floppy:
> 
>     VFS: Insert ...
>     RAMDISK: Compressed ... 0
>     crc error<5>VFS: Insert ...
>     VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
>     Freeding unused kernel memory: 36k code, 4k data
> 
> After that, it died, or, at least, it did nothing visibly. (Why is the
> root filesystem ext2 and not minix, by the way?)

Weird :-(
I will try to reactivate my old sparc2 to do some more trials (but the nvram
battery is dead: I need to reconfigure it by hand before doing anything else).

minix is not architecture independent (byte ordering problems), so I think it
could be easier to make all images with ext2fs to be able to mount them on any
system if, for example, you have to change a piece of software in it by
mounting it on a PC box.

Thanks for your report.

-- 
 Eric Delaunay                 | "La guerre justifie l'existence des militaires.
 delaunay@lix.polytechnique.fr | En les supprimant." Henri Jeanson (1900-1970)