Re: SparcStation 20 and SILO
Wow, that was a tremendous response. Thank you very much everyone.
The problem rooted in two places both of which I had fixed at two
different times.
I have two disks that are 2GB's each. On the "first" one I put my root
partition and swap and the "second" one I left alone as there is data that
I don't want to lose.
The first time through, I put a seperate boot partition in front of root
but it failed to pass the "Make system bootable" step. I re-tried with a
single partition for root with no positive effects. It turns out that I
did need a /boot partition to ensure that the kernel image was put at the
beginning of the drive.
The problem with the "Make system bootable" step seems to have been
magically fixed now, maybe there is something else I was missing.
The second problem was in the Sparc PROM. I'm not entirely understanding
this but the PROM sees the disk that I put linux on as the second disk in
the system while linux sees the disk as sda. When in the prom if I execute
boot disk1 (which is supposedly the second disk in the system) then it
executes SILO. (Perhaps this is based on position on the controller rather
than scsi ID's?)
One person mentioned that older cd-roms don't always like cd-rw media and
that might be the source of my error. For reference sake, I think that may
be a part of it but I also looked at a sun documentation page of sparc
boot-proms and noticed that you can boot different cd-rom partitions and
that the default was partition "c". "boot cdroma"(no typo) will try and
boot the first partition of the cdrom and might give somebody else out
there a better result in the future.
Again, thank you to everyone with your very helpfull suggestions,
-Tim
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On Sun, 23 Feb 2003, Henry Schimmer wrote:
> Hi Tim,
>
> > I have been having some serious issues trying to get a
> > SparcStation 20 to boot. In order to install debian I had to net-boot the
> > machine since it did not like the cd-rom for some reason.
>
> Maybe you have to jumper it to use a blocksize of 512 Bytes; some (older) CDROM-drives don't like CD-RW-media ...
>
>
> > The installation process has had problems at the very end when
> > "Making the system bootable" and has come up with a non-specific failure.
> > Other times it succeeds and simply wants to reboot.
>
> "Cannot find /etc/silo.conf (unknown ext2 error" ? I accepted the plan to
> partition my 9GB-disk with just 2 partitions (swap + /). Some error-message
> complained about "buggy old ROMs don't support drives larger than 1 GB".
>
> > Either way, when I try and boot the machine from the drive I just
> > installed debian on, it gives me an error in the open boot prom:
>
> > "The file just loaded does not appear to be executable."
>
> I do have the same problem with installing Solaris8. No clues so far.
>
> Please give some more information about your hardware. Is your timekeeper /
> NVRAM o.k. ?
>
>
> Regards
>
> Henry
>
> --
> In a world without walls and fences - who needs windows and gates ?
>
>
>
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