Gentoo Archives: gentoo-mips

From: Karin Willers <karin@×××××.de>
To: gentoo-mips@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-mips] IP30: Gentoo installation without monitor & keyboard
Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2008 22:14:46
Message-Id: 1205014480.5529.17.camel@ratlos
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-mips] IP30: Gentoo installation without monitor & keyboard by Dirk Tilger
1 Some remarks here:
2
3 My fdisk is v2.12q, which should be able to write SGI disk labels.
4
5 Fdisk worked before erasing the first block of the disk.
6
7 Strangely enough the advice was (as one option) to erase the
8 the first block and then continue with fdisk. I did not save my
9 boot block, which obviously was a mistake ...
10
11 I did not find 'parted' on the network booted ram disk and there is
12 unfortunately no Gentoo live CD for Octane.
13
14 I'll acquire an SCA-to-SCSI adapter to connect the hard disk
15 to another machine and do the fdisk/parted there.
16
17 Greetings, Karin
18 -----
19 On Sat, 2008-03-08 at 11:37 +0400, Dirk Tilger wrote:
20 > On 08.03.2008, at 01:07, Karin Willers wrote:
21 >
22 > > trying to erase the partition table ended in fdisk not being able
23 > > to read the disk ...
24 > >
25 > > / # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
26 > > 1+0 records in
27 > > 1+0 records out
28 > > / # fdisk /dev/sda
29 > >
30 > > Unable to read /dev/sda
31 > > / #
32 > >
33 > > Any hints? What is the procedure under Linux to add a fresh hard disk
34 > > to an Octane? Browsing the WEB did not reveal anything useful.
35 >
36 > Did fdisk work before? fdisk only supports the MBR partition format.
37 > My guess would be that the SGI firmware (what they would call BIOS on
38 > a PC) will only read SGI labels. I used to create SGI disklabels with
39 > `parted` instead of `fdisk`, but the following site suggests that
40 > there is an fdisk capable of creating SGI disklabels:
41 >
42 > http://www.total-knowledge.com/progs/mips/SGI-BootCD-HOWTO.shtml
43 >
44 > Judging by the man page of fdisk, you might want to go ahead with
45 > `fdisk -i`.
46 > Dirk.
47
48 --
49 gentoo-mips@l.g.o mailing list

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