Recently I did addtional testing, concerning "strange" parted behaviour.
To remind: I finished a new installation using unofficial netinst image. Previously I wrote that after that I've had three working OS-es. But it turned out that I was wrong. "Old" Debian worked (hda5), "new" Debian worked (hda7), while Solaris refused to boot, and after displaing some error it was reseting the machine. So what I did was to copy two first sectors of the hda from another machine: blade-7# dd if=/dev/hda of=/root/fs/hda_first_sectors bs=1024 count=1 blade-7# scp /root/fs/hda_first_sectors blade-5:/root/fs/hda_first_sectors blade-5# dd if=/root/fs/hda_first_sectors of=/dev/hda bs=1024 count=1 Having identical partitions layout, it turned out to be an effective help for Solaris, but now SILO refused to load. It was only displaying "SI" and then nothing. So I booted the machine using netinst CD, chrooted into "old" debian, mounted /boot and reinstalled SILO as root (simply using 'silo'). That corrected the situation, so now I do have three working OS-es. Strange thing is, that before applying the above procedure, paritions were correct up to the point that I was able to boot 2 of 3 OS-es (old & new Debian). After copying two sectors and reinstalling SILO everything came back to normal. I believe that the first sector indeed contains partitions table, but the second seems to contain some important, Solaris-specific information. I repeated the procedure on another machine in question, to confirm that it was not an accident. Repeating the steps corrected the situation as well. Now parted is again able to dislpay all the partitions correctly. So, after all it looks like the problem was on my side. I'm terribly sorry for misinforming you, and I take back my words. Looks like Frans was right when he wrote about "user error". I bow my head before him. He is the one who really knows better how to handle Debian on sparc... But I'm learning :-) Probably putting swap partition in a different location could save me a bit of trouble. But on the side note, it was Solaris installer that put swap partition on cylinders 0-258 of the hard drive. So it looked to me that it knew what it was doing proposing such layout upon install. Friendly, Wiktor Wandachowicz -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
