I am not currently subscribed to this mailing list. I will tell how I successfully installed etch on an "impossible" system.
I have a 1997 alpha PC164 with IDE drive, cdrom, floppy, NE2000 ethernet card. The SRM command "show dev" lists bootable devices: only the floppy and the IDE device connected to the outer IDE header, J14, IDE drive 0/1 connector. Not listed is the device connected to the other IDE header, J13, IDE drive 2/3 connector. The ethernet card is not listed as a bootable device either. I put the CDROM on the bootable IDE header and the hard drive on the other. I was then easily able to install using Debian Etch 4.0r3 netinst CD. I only installed the standard system, not the desktop, since I only have 128 MB ram, equivalent to 64 MB on a 32 bit machine. aboot was automatically installed. I then reversed the IDE cables so the hard drive was on the bootable header. The SRM command "boot dqa0" worked, loading the kernel, but the boot stalled at the following point: Begin: mounting root file system Begin: running /scripts/local-top ide2: I/O resource 0x3EE-0x3EE not free ide2: ports already in use, skipping probe done Begin: waiting for root file system after four minutes of this: Check root= bootarg cat /proc/cmdline or missing modules, devices: cat /proc/modules ls /dev ALERT! /dev/hdc3 does not exist. Dropping to a shell! .. .. (initramfs) We are now in a shell, so we proceed. During install the default partition scheme was: #1 aboot #2 ext2 /boot #3 ext3 / #4 swap If we do "ls" we see no vmlinuz, no /boot. We are in ramdisk, not on hard disk. We do: mount /dev/hda3 /root chroot /root /bin/bash (now we are superuser, "ls" shows hard disk) #mount /dev/hda2 /boot cd boot/etc vi aboot.conf (we change "hdc" to "hda") sync cd /etc vi fstab (we change "hdc" to "hda" and "hda" to "hdc") sync (we cannot shutdown to reboot, we use ctrl-alt-del) Now "boot dqa0" boots the system correctly. There are two copies of aboot.conf, apparently only the one in /boot/etc is used, the one in /etc is ignored. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
