Re: Alpha Jensen Installation Help?

[Michael Engel <engel numerik math uni-siegen de>]

> I was wondering if someone could help with a Jensen install problem I'm
> having? 

Heavens, I'll try. Long time since I last installed a Jensen ... and that
one booted from the RedHat 4.2 CD ROM IIRC ;-).

> > I'm Jim Paradis' installation procedure because I'm having greater
> > problems with the aboot version outlined by Michael Schwingen. Anyone
> > see any major problems here?

Michael's version has worked fine for me in the past. What are your 
problems with his version ?

> > Any help would be much appreciated...
> > Here's the outline of what I've done so far...
> > 
> > 1) downgraded the DECpc150's firmware to version 1.7
> > 2) uncompressed & rawrote bootdisk.1.3.72.jenxen.srm.gz to floppy
> > 3) uncompressed & rawrote pseudo-bootdisk.gz to floppy (planning on
> > installing RedHat)
> > 4) rawrote current RedHat 5.1 Alpha ramdisk to a floppy
> > 5) partitioned hard drive with first partition (4MB) set to filetype
> > BOOT <--is this right? should it be ext2?

boot should be OK.

> > Ran through normal installation procedure as outlined: 
> > 
> > 1) In ARC console, changed floppy config to 1.44 (re-ran ECU)
> > 
> > 2) In ARC console, ran copyboot using bootdisk.1.3.72.jensen.srm image
> > (from /dev/fd0 to /dev/sda) - copy was successful

OK.

> > Strange thing here though... I noticed in the minlabel setup that my
> > first partition was partition 1. I have 5 partitions. The first is a
> > 4MB partition with fs BOOT and the rest are ext2. When I went to
> > delete partitions, partition 0 was not a valid partition. When
> > copyboot writes to the hard drive, it's writing to
> > scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(0)... Is that a concern? Or is
> > partition 1 under the minlabel view actually partition 0? If so then
> > why can't I delete it?

Not sure about that, sorry.

> > yes, I'm a newbie at partitioning this way -- with offsets & such. I'm
> > used to fdisk & disk druid.

Hmmm, then you never had the joy of partitioning 8" Fujitsu Eagle disks on
a VAX running NetBSD ... ;-)

> > 3)  Changed to OSF console, power cycled.
> > 
> > 4) I don't get a >>> prompt immediately. Instead, I get what looks
> > like Linux starting up automatically and get a Kernel panic: VFS:
> > Unable to mount root fs on 08:02

Look for an environment variable called auto_action or similar. The system
is set to autoboot and obviously boots correctly. As there is no root 
file system yet, the mount had to fail ...

> > After I break out of that and get back to the command line, if I type
> > BOOT -FL INSTALL DKA000 it asks me for the ramdisk. 

The Jensen firmware has a problem with the permitted length of boot flags ...

> > I insert it into
> > the floppy drive and it detects a compressed image... 

... but it seems to work ...

> > Then after a
> > while I get an error message - end_request: I/O error, dev 01:00,
> > sector 7xxx-8190, where xxx is the beginning of the sector area and
> > 8190 is the end...

> > Any thoughts? Something obvious?

No joke - use a different floppy disk ! I had lots of problems with HD 
floppies. If that doesn't help, try exchanging the floppy drive with one
you have lying around ...

Btw., I never tried a RH 5.1 install so far, the last RedHat version I
installed on the Jensen was 4.2 ... But there's no reason why 5.1 shouldn't
work.

Hope that helps,
regards,
	Michael Engel	(engel@unix-ag.uni-siegen.de)