Etch installation on Sun Blade 100 - magic for /etc/silo.conf needed
Hello all,
A long and tortuous tale. A Sun Blade 100 which had a Debian Sarge
installation on failed with initially lots of network errors
occurring in the logs. An attempted upgrade in place to Etch failed for
various reasons (mostly my user incompetence :( then the saga below
followed.)
The result was 9 1/2 hours of frustration ending at 21.00 on a
Friday night :(
Machine is a stock Sun Blade with 256MB of memory, 20GB hard drive.
Etch 4.0r0 official release netboot media fails - Boot from CD rom from
SILO succeeds, then machine hangs trying to boot Linux. This is 2.6.18-4
Same goes for CD #1
Similar vintage Ubuntu Feisty Fawn installer succeeds beyond this point
- the ramdisk is a different size, it may be that the installed modules
are different. Boots 2.6.20. Ubuntu allowed us to partition the disk
and label as below
/dev/hda1 512M /boot boot
/dev/hda2 19GB / root
/dev/hda3 512M swap
It died at about 85% installed :(
Gentoo install image liveCD (choice of 2.6.16 / 2.6.16) allows us to
chroot into an installed system. So we debootstrapped :)
Debootstrap got us a Debian - but doesn't appear to configure
/etc/silo.conf properly.
As far as I can tell, we have a valid Debian system on /dev/hda2 with
/boot on /dev/hda1 - but no means of divining the SILO magic needed to
get them to boot.
SILO boots, kernel loads then fails saying /dev/hda2 isn't recognised as
valid
The machine is not Internet connected. Various Googling for valid
/etc/silo.conf revealed that SILO is just badly documented :(
Can anyone share the magic needed to get SILO to boot on one of these
machines. Once we can boot it, we can amend silo.conf and carry on from
there. A sarge bare basic install from CD ROM is also feasible if
necessary.
With many thanks for any and all help.
Andy
[The machine is not readily accessible to me at all times:
unfortunately, I can't post more detailed error messages readily.]
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