Re: SILO and Create Boot Floppy Fails.
On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 05:55:40PM -0500, Andrew Bolyea wrote:
[ please don't top post ]
> I have a small /boot partition (/dev/sda1) consisting of the
> first 10M of sda.
>
> /boot /dev/sda1
> /usr /dev/sda2
> / /dev/sdb1
> swap /dev/sdb2
>
> Currently silo.conf is pointing to root=/dev/sdb1
> Which is correct. And there is link to vmlinuz in that dir.
> Should I change it to the /boot partition?
Despite its name, SILO does not work like LILO. It works much more
like GRUB on i386. That is, SILO expects its config file to be
readable at boot time. So ... if you use a /boot partition, you have
to move the SILO config file there. This means you'll end up with a
directory in /boot named "etc" which contains the file "silo.conf" .
You can then symlink "/etc/silo.conf" to "/boot/etc/silo.conf" so that
you can edit SILO config without thinking too hard :-)
Your silo.conf should look something like this:
partition=1
timeout=50
image=1/vmlinuz-2.4.18-sun4cdm
label=linux
root=/dev/sdb1
read-only
What's a bit confusing here is that the kernel filename is _relative_
to the filesystem named by the "partition" argument; IOW even though
/dev/sda1 is eventually mounted as "/boot" by linux, SILO does not
know that. As a side effect, the kernel sumlinks in the root
filesystem /dev/sdb1 are superfluous.
To install SILO, you'll have to use the '-r' flag as follows:
# silo -r /boot
BTW, I am sure that the reason SILO wouldn't install automatically is
because your root is on /dev/sdb.
> Doesn't something need to be written to the MBR inorder
> for the system to boot using SILO?
Well, the way I understand it, there is no MBR on a sparc. OpenBoot
knows how to do the right thing (that is; if you have the whole disk
partition on partition 3, as someone else noted. fdisk can set this
up for you if you choose to install a new Sun disklabel, option 's').
> Do I need to change something in OpenBoot?
What does "printenv boot-device" at an OpenBoot prompt say? If this
is an SS5 or friends they swap device 0 and 3 for some reason. I
mention this because you have two drives and this can end up violating
the principle of least surprise.
> Right now everytime I boot the machine it puts me to the
> ok> prompt. I belive this is OpenBoot?
> Then I insert the Debian Rescue Floppy and boot from it.
> ok> boot floppy
> Then I use the boot option...
> boot: linux root=/dev/sdb1
> Which correctly boots the machine (I believe using the kernel
> on the hard dirve, not the floppy?)
No, you're using the kernel on the floppy.
> Sorry for all the questions... I am familiar with Debian on i386.
> This is my first time installing Debian on a sparc.
It's a little different, but I think you'll enjoy it!
--
Nathan Norman - Incanus Networking mailto:nnorman@incanus.net
It doesn't matter what you are doing, emacs is always overkill.
-- Stephen J. Carpenter
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