Thanks for your help. I will try another burn. I'm using cdrecord and am using (I believe) good media. What command parameters for cdrecord would you recommend?<br><br>For fun I tried booting with a different external CD-ROM drive ... with identical results. <br><br>I will also try the disk out on a R4600 Indy.<br><br>Thanks for your hard work.<br>MikeMartin<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 1/22/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Kumba</b> <<a href="mailto:kumba@gentoo.org"> kumba@gentoo.org</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Mike Martin wrote:<br>> I recently downloaded and attempted to boot an Octane with this disk. It <br>> died mounting the root partition:<br>><br>> mount: Mounting /newroot/dev/loop0 on /newroot/mnt/livecd failed:<br>> Invalid argument<br>><br>> Not sure what happened. I assume I burnt the disk correctly else it <br>> wouldn't have made it that far. Any suggestions?<br>><br>> MikeM<br><br><br>It's really hard to say. I tested it on all of my systems before uploading, and<br> with the Octane, this means an external drive (funny enough, an O2 CD drive <br>jammed into a Sun 411 case). And that booted fine on both my Octane and Indy.<br><br>"Invalid Argument" from mount could mean a wide array of things (yay for Unix's<br>legacy of non-descriptive, ambiguous errors). The process that occurs on an SGI <br>bootcd for us is a rather complex one:<br><br>1. arcload boots from the DVh partition of the CD<br> (yes, these CDs have partitions)<br>2. arcload finds and boots a kernel<br>3. kernel loads, and executes /init in an embedded initramfs file linked <br> into the kernel<br>4. /init does some prep work, and launches `getdvhoff` to scan the CD<br> for the offset of the next partition (where / lives), and passes a<br> number representing this offset back to `losetup`. <br>5. losetup uses this number to "point" /dev/loop0 at this offset, which<br> effectively makes /dev/loop0 a block device with data on it.<br>6. mount tries to mount /dev/loop0 and pivot_root into the real Gentoo <br> filesystem.<br><br><br>Quite likely, step #5 might've failed somewheres along the line. The offset has<br>to be exact to the bit, so maybe something got whacked in the burn and the<br>detected offset is invalid. Hard to say without more information. Thus, when <br>it got to step #6, boom.<br><br>I'd try re-burning the disk at a slower speed, use only CD-R's of decent quality<br>(TDK, Memorex, Sony, Ricoh/Ritek, etc,.. brands), and use cdrecord (or whatever<br>license-unencumbered version is out there. stupid license wars). A few people <br>reported getting it to work with a windows burn tool, but we have little data on<br>that, thus why cdrecord is the suggested tool.<br><br>Mostly, you were able to read the kernel into memory, which is ~8MB. It's<br> possible the disc you burned was good enough to get those 8MB off to boot the<br>kernel, but when it went looking for the meat, it got denied and pwned.<br><br><br><br>--Kumba<br><br>--<br>Gentoo/MIPS Team Lead<br><br>"Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands <br>do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere." --Elrond<br>--<br><a href="mailto:gentoo-mips@gentoo.org">gentoo-mips@gentoo.org</a> mailing list<br><br></blockquote></div><br>