Re: Installing Squeeze on an Ultra 5

[Patrick Baggett <baggett.patrick@gmail.com>]

I installed squeeze on an Ultra 10. My disks run on a SCSI controller PCI card, but the CD-ROM was still IDE. I didn't have any I/O errors with that...but then again, the amount of I/O might have been insignificant compared to a full IDE disk-based system (did a net install after booting from the CD)...are the IDE errors only for the HDD or for both CD and HDD?

Patrick

2011/12/9 Jack Hill <jackhill@jackhill.us>

On Fri, 9 Dec 2011, Joost van Baal-Ilić wrote:

On Fri, Dec 09, 2011 at 08:55:15AM -0500, Jack Hill wrote:

I'm trying to install squeeze on my Ultra 5. The install failed with
I/O errors. I was fairly sure that the disk was fine because I had
no problems install/running Gentoo. After talking with some people
on #gentoo-sparc on freenode I learned that the IDE controller on
the Ultra 5 (01:03.0 IDE interface: Silicon Image, Inc. PCI0646 (rev
03)) is buggy and these bugs aren't worked around in the new libata
driver, but are in the old-style IDE driver.

Are there Debian install images/kernels in the repository that use
the old-style driver or will I have to build those myself?

I'd try to use the lenny-installer and upgrade from that.  Ugly, but
will likely take you less time.

Thanks, I'll try lenny. If I upgrade to squeeze will I have a problem with squeeze kernel using the libata driver?

(I guess the correct way to answer this is just to try it. I'll report back once I've had time to do that)

Jack