Zhang Weiwu wrote:

> Ferris McCormick wrote:
>
>> So you have two questions:
>> 1.  Will Gentoo boot of the floppy?  And if so,
>> 2.  Can you take enough out of the kernel & put it into modules
>>     to fit the kernel + the boot loader onto a floppy?
>>
>> I am sure your situation is addressed somewhere, but I've never run
>> across it.
>>
>> Good luck, keep trying, and come back with questions.  Eventually
>> someone who knows the answer will get tired of reading my responses
>> and will feed you better information.
>
>
> I think I ran into new problems. After lots of work to shink kernel 
> down to 1.2MB and teste the kernel is bootable, according to silo(1), 
> these steps should create bootable floppy:
>
>                genromfs -d directory/ -f device -a 512 -A 2048,/..
>                mount -t romfs device mountpoint
>                silo -r mountpoint -i /boot/fd.b -F
>                umount mountpoint
>
> This is what I did:
>
> root # fdisk /dev/fd0
>
> Command (m for help): s
> Building a new sun disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only,
> until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous
> content won't be recoverable.
>
>
> Command (m for help): w
> The partition table has been altered!
>
> Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
>
> WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 22: Invalid 
> argument.
> The kernel still uses the old table.
> The new table will be used at the next reboot.
> Syncing disks.
>
> root # genromfs -d /boot/ -f /dev/fd0 -a 512 -A 2048,/..
>
> root # mount -t romfs /dev/fd0 /boot
> root # silo -r /boot -i /boot/fd.b -F
> silo.conf seems to be valid
>
> root # umount /boot
>
> And start the computer:
>
> [Enter OBP]
> ok boot floppy
> Boot device: /pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/ebus@1/fdthree File and args:
> Bad magic number in disk label
> Can't open disk label package
>
> Can't open boot device
>
> So I failed to make a bootable floppy. What do I miss?


God, I don't think its my problem any more! I created a sparc boot 
floppy image using dd(1) with the image I got from:

http://mirror.israel.net/pub/redhat/linux/4.2/en/os/sparc/images/boot.img

This image, said should be able to boot, still produce the above error 
in OBP. I also googled around, lots of people are asking the same 
question (why cannot boot from floppy) and given no satisfying answer. 
Perhaps this is an UltraSparc problem

--
gentoo-sparc@g.o mailing list