[SPARCbook] RedHat 6.0 boot floppies on sparcbook... can't load root disk image

[Hugo.van.der.Kooij at caiw.nl]

On 14 Sep 1999, William M. Perry wrote:

> Derrick J Brashear <shadow at dementia.org> writes:
> 
> > On 13 Sep 1999, William M. Perry wrote:
> > 
> > > Anybody seen this one?  I cannot boot using 'boot floppy' or 'boot
> > > /iommu/sbus/espdma/esp/fd at 5,0' - says no device found.  Booting from sd at 5,0 
> > > works for the boot floppy, and I see:
> > 
> > It's not a floppy (fd), it's a SCSI disk (sd) that happens to be 1.44mb,
> > and that's your problem.
> > 
> > The boot floppies don't deal with that case. I used tftp to do my download
> 
> Well, that sucks. :) Is there any way that people know of to get around
> this?  Could I 'dd' the ramdisk somewhere else and pass some arguments to
> silo at boot?  I could write the ramdisk to one of the partitions on the
> hard drive easily enough, and then just waste it during the install phase.
> I really don't want to screw around with tftp and rarp if I can help it.

rarp and tftp is actually very easy.

	For my sparc book I put in /etc/rc.d/rc.local (on my RedHat Linux
	server):
/sbin/rarp -s 192.168.100.10 0:0:83:ae:26:23
/sbin/arp -s 192.168.100.10 0:0:83:ae:26:23

	I copy the tftp image in /tftpboot and make a symlink with the
	name of:
C0A8640A.SUN4M

The hardest thing is to calculate the hexadecimal equivalant for your IP
address that you will give the SparcBook to put in the symlink. (That 8
digit string is the IP address in the symlink and the part after the dot
is the architecture.)

That's all you need for TFTP/RARP booting. Writing this is more work then
setting it up actually.

Hugo.

-- 
Hugo van der Kooij; Oranje Nassaustraat 16; 3155 VJ  Maasland
hvdkooij at caiw.nl	http://home.kabelfoon.nl/~hvdkooij/
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