On Tue, 11 Sep 2001, Todd Inglett wrote:
> Hi all...
>
> Finally getting back to some time trying Mandrake on IBM hardware. I
> have a 43p 140 and got my own 2.4.10-pre4 kernel running on it. I
> rsync'ed the latest ppc cooker from wtfo (yesterday) and used all-2.2.gz
> as the ramdisk 'cause the all.gz is a bit too big for a floppy :(. This
> is probably my first mistake so holler if so.
>
> I booted the zImage with root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1 ramdisk_size=60000
> rw.
>
> Now the machine has two 2GB scsi drives which happen to be already
> partitioned (DOS fdisk tables). I did an ftp install and got pretty far
> into the installer (expert install). It gave me the "I can't read your
> partition table..." dialog. Here's the end of the log:
>
> ...
> * step `miscellaneous' finished
> * starting step `doPartitionDisks'
> * warning: bad magic number at
> /usr/bin/perl-install/partition_table_empty.pm line 31.
> * found a dos partition table on /dev/sda at sector 0
> * PPC: found a hole on sda before 1040187392, skipping device...
> * warning: bad magic number at
> /usr/bin/perl-install/partition_table_empty.pm line 31.
> * found a dos partition table on /dev/sdb at sector 0
> * error reading partition table: partitions sector #104187392 (1TB) and
> sector #815466240 (470GB) are overlapping!
>
> now this is pretty much were I left off a couple months ago :(.
>
> # fdisk -l /dev/sda
>
> Disk /dev/sda: 67 heads, 62 sectors, 1017 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 4154 * 512 bytes
>
> Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
> /dev/sda1 1 2 4123 41 PPC PReP Boot
> /dev/sda2 3 66 132928 82 Linux swap
> /dev/sda3 67 1017 1975227 83 Linux
>
Yes,
That's pretty much where we left off. You were my only test case on IBM
hardware and you sort of disappeared on my during the beta. I think what
is happening is that drakx detects the architecture, then in the
partitioning scheme, jumps to an appropriate piece of code:
partition_table_dos
partition_table_sun
partition_table_mac
In our case partition_table_mac, which expects to see a Mac style
partition table. In your case it's a DOS style one. What I would need to
do is:
1) detect it's a non Mac PPC machine (I think we discussed some methods I
could use to identify IBM hardware)
2) then use partition_table_dos
This is going to be further complicated as I had to put a number of things
into diskdrake to deal with the way the Mac partition table also assigns
device numbers to "holes", which are all keyed off of an:
if arch() =~ ppc
Which would be true in your case, but not the desired behavior, so I'd
need to check not only the arch but the machine type.
At this point this leaves you kind of stuck. It's crude, but it might be
possible to boot the rescue image, mount your partitions and install the
packages using rpm --root, working your way down depslist.ordered, at
least through basesystem. Or I could grep out the installed files in their
order from my ddebug.log and do a quick script that would install them.
This might at least give you something to start using. I think I need to
get my hands on one of these machines to really get the installer up to
snuff.
Let me know if you want to go this route.
Stew Benedict
--
MandrakeSoft OH/TN, USA http://perso.mandrakesoft.com/~sbenedict/
PPC Faq: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=mandrake-cooker-ppc&m=99441208917647&w=
