[gentoo-dev] Directions please

[gentoo-dev] Directions please

[ifurita]

Hi

I had been considering loading Linux for a very long
time and yesterday after seeing your new release with
the unreal demo I decided to finally do it.

After downloading the ISO and building the CD I ran
into a problem.  I've been out to newsgroups and
websites searching for an answer but alas the answer
doesn't look like it works with gentoo.

My computer is SCSI only and for whatever reason it
will not boot from the SCSI CDROM (though it does
detect the bootable disk in the drive).  So I decided
to just create some sort of linux boot floppy.

Everything I could find about how to do this said
to use a program called RAWRITE and the cdrom.img
on the linux disk.  Problem is I can't find any image
files on the gentoo disk nor can I find RAWRITE on
there.

I'm sure you guys must have a way to create a boot
floppy but I've not found it in the installation
instructions or the alternate installation document
on your website.

Could you please direct me to the location of a file
that will tell me how to get gentoo to run from a
scsi cdrom drive on a system where I can't boot from
that cdrom.

Thanks

  
Randy

Re: [gentoo-dev] Directions please

[Felipe Ghellar]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed, Size: 1664 bytes --]

Have you tried the Forums?
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=8690

ifurita@texas.net wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I had been considering loading Linux for a very long
> time and yesterday after seeing your new release with
> the unreal demo I decided to finally do it.
> 
> After downloading the ISO and building the CD I ran
> into a problem.  I've been out to newsgroups and
> websites searching for an answer but alas the answer
> doesn't look like it works with gentoo.
> 
> My computer is SCSI only and for whatever reason it
> will not boot from the SCSI CDROM (though it does
> detect the bootable disk in the drive).  So I decided
> to just create some sort of linux boot floppy.
> 
> Everything I could find about how to do this said
> to use a program called RAWRITE and the cdrom.img
> on the linux disk.  Problem is I can't find any image
> files on the gentoo disk nor can I find RAWRITE on
> there.
> 
> I'm sure you guys must have a way to create a boot
> floppy but I've not found it in the installation
> instructions or the alternate installation document
> on your website.
> 
> Could you please direct me to the location of a file
> that will tell me how to get gentoo to run from a
> scsi cdrom drive on a system where I can't boot from
> that cdrom.
> 
> Thanks
> 
>   
> Randy
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gentoo-dev mailing list
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org
> http://lists.gentoo.org/mailman/listinfo/gentoo-dev
> 


_______________________________________________________________________
Yahoo! GeoCities
Tudo para criar o seu site: ferramentas fáceis de usar, espaço de sobra e acessórios.
http://br.geocities.yahoo.com/

Re: [gentoo-dev] Directions please

[Grant Goodyear]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 331 bytes --]

The forums will give you info on making a boot floppy.  Not detecting
scsi is definitely a bug, though, and something we want to fix.  What
scsi adapter do you have and which driver do you usually use (if you
know)?  Are you using the livecd-basic-1.4_rc1-r2.iso or the
livecd-ut2003-x86-1.4_rc1.iso?

Thanks!
-g2boojum-


[-- Attachment #2: This is a digitally signed message part --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 189 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-dev] Directions please

[Grant Goodyear]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2857 bytes --]

I'm forwarding this message to the mailing list since the devs need to
know about bootdisk failures.

> In answer to your other questions my SCSI controller is an adaptec 2940.
> The driver for os/2 and stuff is something like aic7870.add ... It's
> pretty common and I thought the gentoo disk had support for the 2940
> but I don't know for sure.
> 
> Also the 2940 is running version 1.23 of the bios (latest one 
> available)... in theory it is suppose to support bootable CD's 
> but it doesn't seem to work with this oh and btw I used the 
> livecd-ut2003-x86-1.4_rc1.iso version.
> 
> The CD works fine when I use it on a machine with an IDE CD ... it's
> just that SCSI CD on my home machine that is the problem.  And it is
> strange that when the system is booting up it notices that it has a
> bootable CD and reports it during the adaptec device check.  But no
> clue why it decides to ignore it and just jumps to the hard drive with
> my operating system.  For an experiment to see if I could force it to
> boot from the SCSI cd I disconnected the harddrive so it wouldn't have
> another device to boot from ... but that failed as it refused to boot
> from anything.

Can you boot other cd's using this drive?  The earlier livecd had a
problem where the kernel was missing the driver for my scsi card, but in
that case the system did start booting the kernel, it just failed when
the kernel needed to mount /.  Failing to boot off of the cd at all
suggests that either the bios isn't set properly, or your burned cd
might be corrupt.

> I'm kind of at a loss about where to go from this point.  I'm tempted
> to create a new partition on my harddisk and just dump the contents
> of the CD on to that partition  and see if I can boot it but I kind 
> of doubt that would work.

No, that wouldn't be the best idea.  Can you boot from Tomsrtbt?  If so,
then after booting into tomsrtbt you can set up the filesystem (creating
and turning on swap space as one of your first steps), mount the cd,
extract the stage1 tarball onto a ready partition, use ifconfig or dhcp
to set up networking, chroot, and you'll be off and running.

> I did manage to find the forums and even found a thread about using a boot disk 
> from toms.  Unfortunately that just lead to another problem in that the 
> initrd.img file is too large to work with on a floppy and if I put it on the 
> harddrive I can't get to it without booting into windows 2000 but the 
> loadlin.exe apparently refuses to work in a dos window.  So I'm again stuck... 
> can't build a bootdisk from the image.

Toms has the appropriate scsi support already compiled in (most likely),
so you don't need an initrd.  In fact, you don't want to build a
bootdisk from the image; you just need enough to get you going.

Hope that helps,
g2boojum


[-- Attachment #2: This is a digitally signed message part --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 189 bytes --]