Re: Status of Debian on Sun Blade 150 (parted and the like)
Recently I did addtional testing, concerning "strange" parted behaviour.
To remind: I finished a new installation using unofficial netinst image.
Previously I wrote that after that I've had three working OS-es. But it
turned out that I was wrong.
"Old" Debian worked (hda5), "new" Debian worked (hda7), while Solaris
refused
to boot, and after displaing some error it was reseting the machine.
So what I did was to copy two first sectors of the hda from another machine:
blade-7# dd if=/dev/hda of=/root/fs/hda_first_sectors bs=1024 count=1
blade-7# scp /root/fs/hda_first_sectors blade-5:/root/fs/hda_first_sectors
blade-5# dd if=/root/fs/hda_first_sectors of=/dev/hda bs=1024 count=1
Having identical partitions layout, it turned out to be an effective
help for
Solaris, but now SILO refused to load. It was only displaying "SI" and then
nothing. So I booted the machine using netinst CD, chrooted into "old"
debian,
mounted /boot and reinstalled SILO as root (simply using 'silo'). That
corrected
the situation, so now I do have three working OS-es.
Strange thing is, that before applying the above procedure, paritions were
correct up to the point that I was able to boot 2 of 3 OS-es (old & new
Debian).
After copying two sectors and reinstalling SILO everything came back to
normal.
I believe that the first sector indeed contains partitions table, but
the second
seems to contain some important, Solaris-specific information.
I repeated the procedure on another machine in question, to confirm that
it was
not an accident. Repeating the steps corrected the situation as well.
Now parted is again able to dislpay all the partitions correctly.
So, after all it looks like the problem was on my side. I'm terribly
sorry for
misinforming you, and I take back my words. Looks like Frans was right when
he wrote about "user error". I bow my head before him. He is the one who
really
knows better how to handle Debian on sparc... But I'm learning :-)
Probably putting swap partition in a different location could save me a bit
of trouble. But on the side note, it was Solaris installer that put swap
partition on cylinders 0-258 of the hard drive. So it looked to me that
it knew
what it was doing proposing such layout upon install.
Friendly,
Wiktor Wandachowicz
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