Re: ARC boot options qstn

[roman songdog eskimo com (Bill Roman)]

Faraz wrote:
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> Hi,
> When I specified in ARC which boot partition to use in the load options =
> to boot from scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(x),  I tried all 8 =
> partitions that I have made and each time I get an unrecognized file =
> system error. I do have a dos partition /dos of type <32M but all 8 give =
> the same error. Prior to attempting a scsi boot I mounted my floppy and =
> copied the lindoad.exe and avanti(milo) into /dos. How does ARC index =
> the partitions? I was just guessing that the /dos resides  in one of the =
> 1-8 partitions...any info would help!

The ARC standard requires a DOS-formatted primary partition to hold
second-level bootstrap programs.  The spec actually specifies that either
12 bit or 16 bit FAT is allowable, but I'm pretty sure that the Alpha
firmware (both ARC console and AlphaBIOS) only understands 16 bit.

I've had success creating and formatting a "system partition" (as it's
referred to) with RedHat 5.0 and 5.1.  It must be a primary partition.
I set the type to 6 (DOS FAT >32MB) even thought it was smaller, because
that's what AlphaBIOS sets it to.  I installed the mkdosfs-ygg RPM,
and used the appropriate command line switch to force it to create a
16 bit FAT instead of defaulting to 12 bit as it normally would on a
small partition.  Works for me.

Another way to do this (if you're starting from scratch) is to use
AlphaBIOS to create and format the system partition.  Delete all the
boot selections before you do this, or it may have a peculiar idea of
which partition is supposed to be the system partition.  Sorry, the
older ARC console doesn't include this functionality.  If you poke
around the microsoft web site (in the NT area), you may be able to
find arcinst.exe, which you can run from the firmware to create
partitions.

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A plea to Exchange users: turn off "always send in Exchange format"
(or whatever the exact wording is) in the Properties for the address
book entry you use to send mail to the list so we don't all get this
ms-tnef stuff.  (If you're using some other microsoft mail user agent,
it probably has an equivalent somewhere.)  Remember -- people reading
the RedHat axp-list are likely to be using something other than Exchange
to read it....

-- 
Bill Roman  (roman@songdog.eskimo.com / roman@songdog.uucp)   running linux