Gentoo Archives: gentoo-mips

From: Karin Willers <karin@×××××.de>
To: gentoo-mips@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-mips] IP30: Gentoo installation without monitor & keyboard - Which installation image to use?
Date: Sun, 01 Jun 2008 14:38:32
Message-Id: 1212331100.5637.25.camel@ratlos
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-mips] IP30: Gentoo installation without monitor & keyboard by Karin Willers
1 Hello All,
2
3 after some delay to get back to the project, I managed to fdisk the
4 drive with an SCA-to-SCSI adapter on another machine, but now new
5 problems show up. I downloaded two boot images which have a different
6 behavior:
7
8 ip30-r10k+-20050530.img is able to mke2fs the partition and mount
9 properly (although the documentation is wrong, since the root directory
10 of the ramdisk is mounted read only, so I'm using /tmp instead), but
11 networking does not work. Ifconfig seems to work, but a ping to a
12 machine in the local network does not succeed.
13
14 ip30-r10k+-20050820.img is good for networking (i.e. ifconfig is ok and
15 pinging a remote machine like www.gentoo.org works), but mounting the
16 partitions of the hard disk does not work, showing the following error
17 message:
18
19 / # mount /dev/sda3 /tmp/gentoo
20 mount: Mounting /dev/sda3 on /tmp/gentoo failed: Input/output error
21 / #
22
23 These boot images seem to be a little bit outdated, aren't they?
24
25 So here my questions:
26
27 1. Has anyone noticed similar things?
28 2. Are there newer boot images available?
29 3. As previously asked, what is the format of the .img file?
30 4. Is there active development done on IP30s?
31
32 Thanks, Karin
33 -----
34 On Sat, 2008-03-08 at 23:14 +0100, Karin Willers wrote:
35 > Some remarks here:
36 >
37 > My fdisk is v2.12q, which should be able to write SGI disk labels.
38 >
39 > Fdisk worked before erasing the first block of the disk.
40 >
41 > Strangely enough the advice was (as one option) to erase the
42 > the first block and then continue with fdisk. I did not save my
43 > boot block, which obviously was a mistake ...
44 >
45 > I did not find 'parted' on the network booted ram disk and there is
46 > unfortunately no Gentoo live CD for Octane.
47 >
48 > I'll acquire an SCA-to-SCSI adapter to connect the hard disk
49 > to another machine and do the fdisk/parted there.
50 >
51 > Greetings, Karin
52 > -----
53 > On Sat, 2008-03-08 at 11:37 +0400, Dirk Tilger wrote:
54 > > On 08.03.2008, at 01:07, Karin Willers wrote:
55 > >
56 > > > trying to erase the partition table ended in fdisk not being able
57 > > > to read the disk ...
58 > > >
59 > > > / # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
60 > > > 1+0 records in
61 > > > 1+0 records out
62 > > > / # fdisk /dev/sda
63 > > >
64 > > > Unable to read /dev/sda
65 > > > / #
66 > > >
67 > > > Any hints? What is the procedure under Linux to add a fresh hard disk
68 > > > to an Octane? Browsing the WEB did not reveal anything useful.
69 > >
70 > > Did fdisk work before? fdisk only supports the MBR partition format.
71 > > My guess would be that the SGI firmware (what they would call BIOS on
72 > > a PC) will only read SGI labels. I used to create SGI disklabels with
73 > > `parted` instead of `fdisk`, but the following site suggests that
74 > > there is an fdisk capable of creating SGI disklabels:
75 > >
76 > > http://www.total-knowledge.com/progs/mips/SGI-BootCD-HOWTO.shtml
77 > >
78 > > Judging by the man page of fdisk, you might want to go ahead with
79 > > `fdisk -i`.
80 > > Dirk.
81 >
82
83 --
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