Re: rescue disks for a tecra
I must admit that only my second thought when I read Bruce's note was
for his family's and his property's safety, my first being, "Oh no!
There goes the new boot disks."
The problem is that on Tecra 710/720/730 laptops (I don't know about
the 500 series) lilo cannot load a bzImage. With the rescue disk, you
get "Loading root.bin ............" and "Loading linux ............",
and then the laptop reboots and gives the "boot:" prompt again.
Loadlin (version 1.6), however, does not have a problem with bzImages.
It has been reported that the Tecra 710/720 BIOS upgrade (720V580.EXE
of 12-06-96) fixes this. The Tecra 730 BIOS upgrade (730V530.EXE also
of 12-06-96) does not. I contacted Toshiba about this, and the
Technical representative that I spoke with was very friendly, but I
have not heard back from them yet. The BIOS upgrades are available at
http://www.toshiba.com/tais/csd/support/files/.
At http://www.cck.uni-kl.de/misc/tecra710/, Jens Maurer discusses the
problem and gives a kernel patch which works around it, a patch which
Bruce was going to incorporate it into the next set of boot disks. I
would try it myself as a service to other Tecra owners if I knew what
went into the boot disks (possible just the rescue disk). Can any of
the developers out there help?
Debian 1.2 was going to be an initial installation on my machine, but
due to the problem, I had to install 1.1 first and then upgrade. (PHT
Linux Monthly CDs finally had a use!) I made a minimal installation
from the 1.1 CD, but for the service of those who only have a 1.2 CD,
I could test to see what the absolute minimum of 1.1 is necessary.
Perhaps it is possible to use only the 1.1 floppies, and then use the
1.2 CD when dselect is first run. I doubt that it would be possible
to use the 1.1 boot and root disks, and then substitute the 1.2 base
disks, but I could try.
Once you have a working system, you can make it bootable with the new
bzImage via loadlin, but make sure that you use loadlin version 1.6
which is in the Debian 1.2 loadlin package, not loadlin version 1.5
which is in the /tools directory and can't handle bzImages at all
(nothing to do with Tecras). (I have notified the loadlin maintainer
about this, but he was not sure who maintained /tools, so he past the
note on to Bruce. I notice that ftp.debian.org still has loadlin
version 1.5.) The alternative to using loadlin, of course, is
building a kernel with the patch.
Richard G. Roberto <richr@bear.com> wrote:
> The new kernel doesn't boot and the old kernel has been overwritten.
> This was a 1.1 upgraded, so I don't even have an older working set
> of 1.2 floppies.
Richard,
If you have a 710/720, I recommend the BIOS upgrade. If you have a
730, you need to boot your system somehow. If you could get a copy of
the 1.1 boot and root disks, you could mount your system and then grab
your new kernel for use with loadlin. Unfortunately, buzz seems to
have disappeared from ftp.debian.org. Alternatively, I could send you
a vmlinuz and loadlin.exe (657183 and 32208 bytes). Can you uudecode?
If not, what other options are there for email binary transfer? I
could try to get a minimal web site up tonight as an alternative. I
don't have access to outgoing ftp, but a link to a binary should be
downloadable over the web.
Kirk Hilliard
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