On Sun, Jan 02, 2005 at 11:15:35PM -0500, Mike Martin wrote:

Now I'm very confused .... on my next reboot ... the network wouldn't
work. After much trial and error, I got the current unstable d-i image
to work. It did it all right up to the reboot (where is warns you that
it doesn't have a boot loader installed).

There may be some problems with 2.6 kernels and pci irqs on prep. I will
investigate this shortly.

There is indeed no prep boot-loader installer available. I hear there is a
partman-prep prepared, but not yet part of d-i. more to this below.

Now what!

I have an installed system, but I can't figure out how to boot it! I
have /boot/vmlinux on /dev/sdb1 and a root on /dev/sdb1. How do I
write a boot sector or tell OpenFirmware to boot from this file? I
tried to netboot and set root=/dev/sdb1 - but without the scsi modules
loaded it fails to read the drives and panics.

You need to install mkvmlinuz, i think it is already, but not use
/boot/vmlinux-2.6.8-powerpc, but /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8-powerpc, which is the
result of mkvmlinuz adding the initrd containing the modules onto the kernel,
and then adding the prep simple bootloader. Check if you have the
vmlinuz-2.6.8-powerpc, which should have been generated at install time, and
copy it to your netboot tftp server, and try again. It should even recognize
the root= partition automatically.

I think I neet to create a type 41 PReP boot partition and get the
kernel onto it. I've found this thread:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2002-09/msg00016.html

and this:
http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/support/solutions/champion_server/rs6k.shtml

Yep. Until partman-prep is ready, you should simply try to add the prep flag
to the a small partition. I think the normal scheme is to create /dev/sdb1 as
a small (8MB ?) prep partition, /dev/sdb2 as swap, and /dev/sdb3 as /. If
partman is not able to do it, jump to console 2, and launch parted directly,
and do a set 1 prep on.

Then i suppose that copying the kernel is just a matter of :

  dd if=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8-powerpc of=/dev/sdb1

but you have to have a small prep partition as /dev/sdb1, or the above will
erase whatever you have on /dev/sdb1.

I tried booting up with the installer, going to a shell after the scsi
was active and the installed system was mounted. I used sfdisk from
/target/sbin to create a 10 Meg type 41 partition on the first HD
(/dev/sdb0 eventually). I used dd to copy /target/boot/vmlinux to this
partition. But it still won't boot.

Ah, no sure what is wrong. I don't think /dev/sdb0 exists. Not sure really.

I'm very close. If I can get the system to boot (really it needs to
boot itself - not netboot) I'd call this a success.

Friendly,

Sven Luther