Re: [gentoo-mips] IP30: Gentoo installation without monitor & keyboard

[Karin Willers <karin@visti.de>]

Some remarks here:

My fdisk is v2.12q, which should be able to write SGI disk labels.

Fdisk worked before erasing the first block of the disk.

Strangely enough the advice was (as one option) to erase the
the first block and then continue with fdisk. I did not save my
boot block, which obviously was a mistake ...

I did not find 'parted' on the network booted ram disk and there is
unfortunately no Gentoo live CD for Octane.

I'll acquire an SCA-to-SCSI adapter to connect the hard disk
to another machine and do the fdisk/parted there.

Greetings,  Karin
-----
On Sat, 2008-03-08 at 11:37 +0400, Dirk Tilger wrote:
> On 08.03.2008, at 01:07, Karin Willers wrote:
> 
> > trying to erase the partition table ended in fdisk not being able
> > to read the disk ...
> >
> > / # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
> > 1+0 records in
> > 1+0 records out
> > / # fdisk /dev/sda
> >
> > Unable to read /dev/sda
> > / #
> >
> > Any hints? What is the procedure under Linux to add a fresh hard disk
> > to an Octane? Browsing the WEB did not reveal anything useful.
> 
> Did fdisk work before? fdisk only supports the MBR partition format.  
> My guess would be that the SGI firmware (what they would call BIOS on  
> a PC) will only read SGI labels. I used to create SGI disklabels with  
> `parted` instead of `fdisk`, but the following site suggests that  
> there is an fdisk capable of creating SGI disklabels:
> 
> http://www.total-knowledge.com/progs/mips/SGI-BootCD-HOWTO.shtml
> 
> Judging by the man page of fdisk, you might want to go ahead with  
> `fdisk -i`.
> Dirk.

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