installation problem
After successfully (though not uneventfully ;-) installing HardHat on an Indy/r5k, I am now faced with the quandry of installing to another nearly identical machine. The only difference is that the second machine's IRIX partitions were blown away when I tried to use fdisk (no, I didn't finish reading the installation instructions at this point...).
All of the SGI employees out there are probably saying, "Reinstall IRIX", but (it's a long story) I'd rather do this the Linux way. Any suggestions? I looked at the prom man page, and I can get the box to boot the kernel with a 'setenv diskless y' and 'setenv OSLoader /var/boot/vmlinux' (and then some... I'm not in front of the machine at the moment). However, with the IRIX dhcp_bootp daemon, I can't seem to set the suggested nfs root partition, and now that sash is gone, I can't seem to get command line parameters to work anymore (vmlinux is the OSLoader, and it's not doing the sash thing), and hence, the kernel won't boot.
Since I have the other machine up and running, is it possible to 'clone' the disk with dd? Or will it not catch all of the disk label header stuff needed to recognize partitions?
Also, on the working machine, is there a better way to boot it than telling it to 'boot bootp():vmlinux' each time? Again, working with one disk per machine, IRIX is gone (but I didn't blow sash away on this one).
If this means that we need some tools to write to the disk headers (ie, a SGI-aware fdisk, or something to put files into the disk label directory (similar to the way sash and ide are stored)), I'd be interested in talking to someone who can get to the information necessary to do this. (I'm still looking at booting from a CD, but since most of the working CD-ROM drives are in use, that may wait.)
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Charles Lepple
System Administrator, Virginia Tech EE Workstation Labs [email protected] || http://www.foo.tho.org/charles/
Quoted 6 lines · Charles Lepple
After successfully (though not uneventfully ;-) installing HardHat on an Indy/r5k, I am now faced with the quandry of installing to another nearly identical machine. The only difference is that the second machine's IRIX partitions were blown away when I tried to use fdisk (no, I didn't finish reading the installation instructions at this point...).
Quoted 10 lines
All of the SGI employees out there are probably saying, "Reinstall IRIX", but (it's a long story) I'd rather do this the Linux way. Any suggestions? I looked at the prom man page, and I can get the box to boot the kernel with a 'setenv diskless y' and 'setenv OSLoader
/var/boot/vmlinux' (and then some... I'm not in front of the machine at the moment). However, with the IRIXdhcp_bootpdaemon, I can't seem to set the suggested nfs root partition, and now that sash is gone, I can't seem to get command line parameters to work anymore (vmlinux is the OSLoader, and it's not doing the sash thing), and hence, the kernel won't boot.
Try
boot -f bootp()boothost:vmlinux xxx yyy
where boothost is the host from which you want ot boot, and xxx and yyy are your vmlinux options. The "-f" avoids using OSLoader.
...
Quoted 4 lines
Also, on the working machine, is there a better way to boot it than telling it to 'boot bootp():vmlinux' each time? Again, working with one disk per machine, IRIX is gone (but I didn't blow sash away on this one).
You should be able to do something like:
setenv -p OSLoadPartition bootp()
setenv -p OSLoadFilename :vmlinux
setenv -p OSLoadOptions auto
setenv -p AutoLoad Y
Without the system partition, you might be able to do
setenv -p SystemPartition bootp()
setenv -p OSLoader :vmlinux