On Wed, Dec 13, 2000 at 09:26:12AM -0800, Mike Fedyk wrote: > > Great, Although, this makes me wonder. Why don't we just create a hfs > partition > with a blessed system file like we do with the hfs boot disk?
several reasons, the hfs boot floppy uses miboot, which is not a good
general purpose bootloader at all. its incapable of dual booting
anything. it has no text based config file so you must reconfigure it
by editing the binary with a hexeditor. and i don't think it can even
be packaged for debian and put in main since it cannot be compile
within debian, it requires a non-free OS with a non-free compiler to
build. besides that unlike newworlds you can't use the
Apple_Bootstrap partition type to prevent MacOS from mounting a miboot
partition which means that if you boot macos your miboot partition
will be made unbootable as macos will see its not real and remove the
bootblock and blessing.
miboot also is incapable of reading kernels off an ext2fs.
> Yeah, I found that out the hard way. The debbootstrap wouldn't even tell you
> why it couldn't "make debian boot directly from the hard disk"... Although I
> did find some docs that said quik needs the kernel on the same partition as
> /etc. The symlink problem is new though, to me at least.
in general you should NEVER make a seperate /boot partition, leave it
on the root filesystem. /boot is only needed on broken x86 systems.
> Great, I just mirrored the archive a week ago. When did this new set go in?
> Will it actually let you make a boot floppy now?
you cannot make a boot floppy on powerpc, this funtion in dbootstrap
has now been properly disabled, it now just displays a dialog telling
you it cannot be done instead of failing obscurly.
i posted my quik comments several times in the last month if you have
november you should have it.
> I have had to go through the process of hfs-boot-floppy => debian-install-root
> => mount drives on /target => chroot /target..... to be able to work in the
> system.
if you have a seperate /boot get rid of it, get all the kernels
properly installed in /boot on the / filesystem setup a quik.conf like
so:
partition=2
image=/boot/vmlinux-2.2.18pre21
label=Linux
root=/dev/hda2
read-only
change root= to be your root partition, and partition= to the same
partition number as root. then just run /sbin/quik and
nvsetenv boot-device `ofpath /dev/hda2`
> If it won't make a boot floppy for me, how do I make one? I noticed the
> kernel
compile the boot floppies or do it all manually, see the boot floppies
source for how to do that.
> is 2.5 MB in my /boot after the initial install, so I won't be able to use
> that
> one... maybe the one on the hfs boot floppy would work... Any ideas?
i don't know how the miboot floppies actually work it just about has
to be using either a xcoff kernel or a gzipped kernel but i don't
think miboot supports either, i have not disected the miboot boot
floppies to see what magic drow pulled.
--
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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