Re: Install problem on a Sparc 2 (summary)
John Turnbull wrote:
>
> I am attempting to install potato on a Sparc 2 (64M Ram, 410M HD). I am
> using the rescue floppy and the root floppy and getting the rest via nfs
> from a local machine. My background is Linux - mostly RedHat/Mandrake on
> i386 architecture machines.
>
> 9/10ths of the install seems to go fine, but I cannot make a boot floppy
> and the hard drive boot setup seems to fail.
>
> Now I suspect that I may have done the fdisk thing wrong and hosed the
> first cylinder (which I now understand is not good on a Sun).
>
> Originally, I had a 8M /boot partition starting at 0 and the a 64M swap
> and the rest as /.
>
> Then I tried 8M /boot starting at 1, then 64 M swap and the rest /.
>
> Did I need to do something to 'unhose' the first cylinder?
>
> What reasons are there for failure to make a boot floppy (I did try two
> different new floppies). John T
Thank you all for your assistance.
The nut of the problem was that I was attempting to treat Sun hardware
like Intel stuff. Specifically. Having a small boot partition is more
trouble than it is worth. You need to have both /boot and /etc on the
same partition if you want to have an easy life. The man pages for silo
mention something about not using cylinder 0, So I had started my first
partition at 1. Well that will prevent booting off the hard disk. So I
am back to a large / in /dev/sda1 and a swap in /dev/sda2 and /usr on
/dev/sdb1. Now I can boot off of the hard disk/.
I still have not managed to make a boot floppy during the install, but I
can live with that.
Is there any sparc specific documentation auto installed, or that I
should install. I would like to know something about the differences in
X configuration and serial ports. John T
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