I have a couple of questions that I hope someone here can answer. I've looked around quite a bit on google, the Debian manuals, and elsewhere but haven't found any definitive answers for these questions.
At work we are running Debian on some Motorola MVME2700 (prep based) machines. I'm looking for a bootloader of some sort for these machines so that a hosed up kernel build doesn't force me to rebuild the whole machine. I can (and have) certainly use a network boot to get a machine back to a usable state, but this really isn't ideal for the delivered product. From what I understand, the firmware on prep machines doesn't really provide a method to read from the disk at boot time (aside from raw disk reads/writes), so there probably isn't a trivial solution. I saw an article in the Suse ppc area where they have some sort of bare bones kernel that gets loaded, and which allows you to provide boot options, kernel path, etc to boot with, but the article looked pretty dated. Does anyone have any experience with this that could provide some hints/references? The default kernel that ships with Debian (I've tried Potato (2.2r6) and Woody) locks up at boot time when accessing the SCSI controller. Using a cross compiler and booting over the network to initialize the machine, I've been able to build a kernel and get a machine up and running quite well. However, ideally, I would like to simply replace the kernel on the install CD with a kernel that doesn't lock up the machine. I'm guessing I need the following configuration options enabled in the kernel (not modules, obviously): I/O device support (SCSI drivers, etc) ext2fs support iso9660 support RAM disk support initrd support Kernel boot options: root=/dev/ram - (anything else??) I think these should be all the options I need to get the install CD to function properly. I'm assuming I can just copy the whole first CD to a temporary location, replace the prep boot kernel(s), make a bootable ISO with mkhybrid and the -prep-boot option, and I should be good to go. I'm not sure that this is actually possible, or whether or not this is the correct way to go about this process. Also, I'm not sure which kernel(s) to replace in the ISO. Anyone have any pointers or experience with this? Sorry for the length of this post, and thanks in advance for any advice. -Drew
