First, I'll answer my own question: > (And how many kinds of incompatible partition table are there?)
The answer is quite a lot. See check_partition() in linux/drivers/block/genhd.c for a list of the ones that Linux can understand. I managed to convert my previous partition table (I don't know what type it was) to a Sun partition table while preserving the ext2 file system in /dev/sda2; /dev/sda1 got trashed, but that was only swap, fortunately. In general you can't always convert a partition table from one type to another because the different types have different rules about where a partition may begin. And there are all sorts of problems with changing geometries ... Therefore, the installation instructions should contain a clear warning about making sure that you use a Sun partition table. Otherwise the PROM will refuse to boot from that disc. Ideally dinstall/dbootstrap should warn you if you try to use a different kind of partition table but I assume it's too late to change that for slink. Having said that, I still can't boot. This time the error message, when I type "boot disk3" or equivalents, is something to the effect of "The file loaded does not appear to be executable". I ran silo beforehand with /etc/silo.conf as supplied by dinstall/dbootstrap, and silo gave no error. Any suggestions? Edmund
