Subject: Re: Red Hat Rawhide/Alpha
From: Chris Kloiber (ckloiber@rochester.rr.com)
Date: Sun Nov 28 1999 - 00:27:25 AKST
Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> Chris Kloiber wrote:
> >
> > I think that between 6.0 and this
> > Rawhide, I have noticed a subtle difference in the way ext2 partitions
> > are formatted, with much fewer copies of the superblock being created
> > now. This seems to have broken both milo and aboot,
>
> Are you using e2fsprogs-1.17 and partition from which you are booting
> is bigger than 1/2 Meg in size? IIRC (i.e. size) correctly this version
> of e2fsprogs will format such partitions by default with 4K blocks
> and sparse superblocks but there are options which allow to override
> these settings. I am not aware of any version of Alpha boot utilities
> which would be able to handle a file system formatted that way.
>
> If you are using milo and you have a FAT partition on your hard drive
> you should be able to boot with a kernel on it.
>
> Michal
>
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Thanks for all the responses!
To the one guy who asked, Red Hat Rawhide is the bleeding-edge, fly by
the seat of your pants, development version of Red Hat for all three
platforms. Available by FTP only as far as I know, and changing almost
daily, at ftp://rawhide.redhat.com/pub/rawhide. Rawhide is definitely not
meant for production systems, and it's not even guaranteed to install, much
less run. Since my Alpha is mostly a hobby-box, I thought I'd give it a
shot.
Well, I just did a custom install and installed everything. The version
of e2fsprogs is 1.18-1.
I currently have a 4meg (asked for 2) dos partition as hda1, and milo will
boot from there. The problem comes after milo loads. Normally you can 'ls'
the ext2 partitions from milo but with the 'sparse superblocks' as you call
them way you get is a bunch of lines of useless garbage, as though milo is
looking at a data sector and trying to interpret it as a directory. when
you tell milo to boot the kernel, ie: MILO> boot hda2:/boot/vmlinuz
root=/dev/hda2 I am told that milo failed to load the kernel. I can (and
currently do) use MILO> boot fd0:/vmlinux.gz root=/dev/hda2 and boot off
the floppy. Once an actual kernel is loaded, the ext2 partitions can be
accessed normally.
Aboot exhibits the same problem I think, although I of course can't try an
'ls' on the partition. After running "/sbin/swriteboot /dev/hda1
/boot/bootlx" during the install to install aboot, and setting my SRM
variables appropriately, the system will find a valid bootblock, but fail
when it tries to find the kernel at 2/boot/vmlinux-2.2.12-42. I will be
investigating an option I once heard of where you can write aboot and the
kernel together at once to the type 'boot' partition so that they are
loaded in the same disk read. That may work, but it seemed unnecessarily
difficult whe I first heard of it. An updated version would be better.
Chris Kloiber
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