Re: Install problem on a Sparc 2

[John Turnbull <johnrt@home.com>]

Ragga Muffin wrote:
> 
> John Turnbull <johnrt@home.com> wrote:
> > Could you please spell it out for me. How do I want to lay out the disk?
> >
> > Its strange, I do have Mandrake 7.1 running on another disk (out of the
> > machine at this time) but I do not remember handling the disk
> > partitioning differently than I would on an Intel box.
> 
> In debian too this is pretty straightforward, I wonder what went wrong
> in your install...

> In *BSD you have a disklabel utility to create a new label from the bios/prom
> entry or from a file.
> I haven't seen one in the linux world, so if that's your problem, it looks
> you'll have to fdisk and reinstall....

Yes, I expect that I am at that stage. This is OK. I do not have much
time invested in this setup.

> 
> Try this for the appropriate disk:
> -fdisk /dev/sdX
> -create a new empty sun disklabel (s)
> -create partitions 1 and 2 (e.q. / ,swap)
> -create partition 3 as Whole disk (this is more or less automatic IIRC)
> -create additional partitions
> -save and quit
> -reinstall debian
> 
> Remember you cannot boot from a partition that exeeds 1 GB in size.

No problem, this is an old box with a 410MB spinner.

> 
> Here's what our SS5 looks like from fdisk:
> 
> js05:# fdisk /dev/sda
> Command (m for help): p
> 
> Disk /dev/sda (Sun disk label): 20 heads, 109 sectors, 3830 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 2180 * 512 bytes
> 
>    Device Flag    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sda1             0       100    109000   83  Linux native
> /dev/sda2  u        100       160     65400   82  Linux swap
> /dev/sda3             0      3830   4174700    5  Whole disk
> /dev/sda4           160      2083   2096070   83  Linux native
> /dev/sda5          2083      3830   1904230   83  Linux native
> 

Thank you!   ^ There is that lower case 'u' flag I was talking about.
What is it? It is not discussed in the fdisk man.

Also the man states:

       A BSD/SUN type disklabel can describe  8  partitions,  the
       third of which should be a `whole disk' partition.  Do not
       start a partition that  actually  uses  its  first  sector
       (like  a  swap  partition)  at cylinder 0, since that will
       destroy the disklabel.

yet your /dev/sda1 starts at 0. I am missing something here.

At any rate, I do a reinstall, and do fdisk carefully.


> HTH,
> 
> --
> Ragga