Installation woes get worse

[Josh Kuperman <josh@saratoga.lib.ny.us>]

After experimenting and researching, including accepting the defaults
for the drive when I did the custom Sun label, I decided my previously
problem disk errors could be avoided as long as I was under the actual
capacity of the drive after formatting it.

So I go and put in my 512M of RAM, leave in the two processors and
decided to reinstall from scratch. The 9GB drive - misformatted with the
defaults thinks itself to be about 180M - but it does have a minimal
and bootable (after I read the Sparc 10 manual to figure out the prom
command I needed was "boot disk3") linux partition.

However, for some reason, while I can boot off the tiny partition, I
now choke when I try to boot from the CD drive. I get to the Welcome
message and can give the initial boot command. After I hit the enter
key it starts off with an

initrd extends beyond end of memory - but it seems to progress OK.

it goes on for a while and dies with a kenel panic apparently
triggered by a

UFS_read_super bad Magic Number 0x00000000 on dev 1/0

Now I have to be able to read access the CD to get this far. And the
kernel installed on the misformatted disk drive isn't complaining when
I boot that kernel. 

I thought it might be something with memory so I tried adding mem=512K
as a boot parameter. That didn't help. If I can't boot from the CD -
I'm stuck because I need to reformat the hard drive.

How do I tell what I'm missing, here. The manual says that it should
install fine with two processors in the machine even though it will
only use one until I rebuild the kernel. I didn't have any problems
with less memory - whats causing the problem?

Any advice will be appreciated. 


-- 
Josh Kuperman                       
josh@saratoga.lib.ny.us