[gentoo-mips] IP30: Gentoo installation without monitor & keyboard - Which installation image to use?

[Karin Willers <karin@visti.de>]

Hello All,

after some delay to get back to the project, I managed to fdisk the
drive with an SCA-to-SCSI adapter on another machine, but now new
problems show up. I downloaded two boot images which have a different
behavior:

ip30-r10k+-20050530.img is able to mke2fs the partition and mount
properly (although the documentation is wrong, since the root directory
of the ramdisk is mounted read only, so I'm using /tmp instead), but
networking does not work. Ifconfig seems to work, but a ping to a
machine in the local network does not succeed.

ip30-r10k+-20050820.img is good for networking (i.e. ifconfig is ok and
pinging a remote machine like www.gentoo.org works), but mounting the
partitions of the hard disk does not work, showing the following error
message:

/ # mount /dev/sda3 /tmp/gentoo
mount: Mounting /dev/sda3 on /tmp/gentoo failed: Input/output error
/ #

These boot images seem to be a little bit outdated, aren't they?

So here my questions:

1. Has anyone noticed similar things?
2. Are there newer boot images available?
3. As previously asked, what is the format of the .img file?
4. Is there active development done on IP30s?

Thanks,   Karin
-----
On Sat, 2008-03-08 at 23:14 +0100, Karin Willers wrote:
> 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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