Re: Boot from CD is a no-go

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

Steve Dunham wrote:
> Christopher Reid Palmer <reid@pconline.com> writes:
 > > If all else fails you could try booting from the network and then use the
> > > CD.
> 
> > But it would still need to load the RAM disk image from the CD-ROM, and
> > that's what fails. Ultimately, this will be a net-booting machine that
> > gets its / filesystem via NFS from my Linux/x86 system, but I need a way
> > to get the distribution off the CD.
> 
> No, the network boot image contains both a kernel and the initial
> ramdisk.  The i386 box would provided the address to the sparc via
> RARP and the tftpboot image via tftp.
> 
> > Since the initial plan (boot from CD and install to an external HDD,
> > serve the external HDD from the x86) seems doomed, I wonder if I can
> > just extract the files I need by hand from the x86 to another disk on
> > the x86? Has anyone done this before? The readmes on the CD didn't have
> > anything to say about this.
> 
> You could do this, but you have to make a sun disklabel on the disk
> (instead of a DOS partition table) with the hidden "s" command in
> fdisk, and you would need to use "intelsilo" to install the bootloader
> on the hard drive.  (The intelsilo package isn't in the Debian
> distribution yet, and I've never tested it on a hard drive.)

As far as I can tell, intelsilo was only design to build bootable CDROM from a
PC box.  The last time I checked sources (0.8.5 ?), there was no harddisk
support.  Therefore the only way to fully install Debian/sparc on a harddisk
is from a sparc.
As Steve told you, you can boot your sparc of the net then, at the time the
installation process is requiring to partition your harddisk, spawn a shell
(or switch to tty2) then run "fdisk -s" to partition your harddisk.
Then complete the installation as usual.  The step "make your hard disk
bootable" writes a bootable sector on your disk using silo, the sparc boot
loader.

Regards.

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