On Fri, Mar 19, 2004 at 03:42:27PM -0800, Daniel Narkis wrote: > Hi Sven,
Ok, copying to debian-boot, since this is most relevant there, and to rick thomas, which volunteered to help with installation manual. Rick, this is a boot method on a chrp-rs6k ibm box. I don't know if you are familiar with these boxes, but just keep this mail until we are ready to write documentation for it. Anton, copying you since i was not sure you would read this, and i want your feedback on the possibility of creating a PReP boot partition. > Eventually successfull installation of Sarge on the > F50. > After few tries I found that auto-boot can be done > using a PReP partition. > So I think you can leave the vfat out of the initrd > and try to put the option of creating PReP partiton. > Thanks for the help. Cool. BTW, is there anything particular needed for a PReP partition ? Or is it just a plain empty partition that can be used for booting ? The box uses a MBR partition table. I believe that we may create a PReP-bootloader-installer or something which would take care of moving the kernel to this partition. Not sure though how this would work out. A bit like what nobootloader does. > Now I have to check: > 1. Install yaboot on sda1. Someone knows if yaboot > works on this boxes. It should. > 2. When I start GDM the screen turns to black and the > CPU is 99.9% w/ XFree86 process. My card is MGA G200 > PCI. I have no idea why. Maybe V4 is not supporting > this card ?? Bug in the mga driver? Conf error.... Fill a bug report against GDM/XFree86. Check which process is eating all CPU with top or a similar command first. > Procedure for the record for others: > During the installation select manual partition. > First!!! create a 4MB unused partition at the begining > of sda (I understood that this is the size otherwise > it won't work). After that create your own So, kernels no bigger than 4MB can be used in this way ? This would be a problem if we embedd an initrd in those, but there is a size limit anyway. > partitioning (mostly it will be the swap and ext3 for > the /) > After base installation, reboot > On the OF prompt > o > boot cdrom:\vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2 Cool, this will have to go into the installation manual for CHRP. > NOTE: "cdrom:\vmlinuz" is the > http://people.debian.org/~luther/d-i/vmlinuz-2.4.25-powerpc-chrp-rs6k.initrd > burned on a CD ISO9660 format. > and "root=/dev/sda2" is presumed your / partition that > you created just before. Notice that this kernel + builtin initrd will be on the official debian/Sarge CD (i plan to implement this on sunday), and that those CD should even be made to be CHRP-bootable. > When the installation finish and you reboot again. > At the SMS level: > Choose the disk you want to boot. > Go to OF prompt (F8) > o > printenv boot-device > Check the output > o > setenv boot-device <previous output>:1 > BTW: I found that the disk I use has an alias named > "disk". To check that run > o > devalias > > o > setenv boot-file root=/dev/sda2 > NOTE: root=/dev/sda2 is presumed your / partition that > you just created. > > You still have to boot from the cdrom > With the new system up; run > # cfdisk (BE CAREFULL). Change type of sda1 to PReP > 0x41. Ok, this would be the relevant info for Anton. Anton, do you think that it is possible to set the partition type with libparted, i have some doubts about it, but could be wrong. > # dd if=/boot/<your vmlinuz> of=/dev/sda1 This would be in the preploader-installer. or however we are going to call that. Friendly, Sven Luther
