I took the suggestion below (from Peter, thanks so much for your quick reply and help!):
I ensured that in partitioning sda1 (first of my two Seagate 2.1 Gb drives, the other I'm ignoring until system is up and running), I chose the "s" option to make a sun disk label (partition type is 5), and I even had the installation routine scan for bad blocks on both root and swap partitions on this drive. Nonetheless, when I reboot in the installation process, I get the same message: Boot device:/iommu/sbus/[EMAIL PROTECTED],8400000/[EMAIL PROTECTED],8800000/[EMAIL PROTECTED],0 File and args: Bad magic number in disk label Can't open disk label package Can't open boot device A little more info: If I then type: "boot disk1" at the ok prompt (I'm not sure what exactly disk1 is, it was just a sample option I tried), I get this: Boot device:/iommu/sbus/[EMAIL PROTECTED],8400000/[EMAIL PROTECTED],8800000/[EMAIL PROTECTED],0 File and args: SILO Buggy old PROMs don't allow reading past 1GB from start of the disk. Send complains to SMCC Read error on block 294916 Cannot find /etc/silo.conf (Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read) Couldn't load /etc/silo.conf No config file loaded, you can boot just from this command line. Type [prompath;]part/path_to_image [parameters] on the prompt Anyway, although I feel quite comfortable in general installing, administering, and using linux-x86 (Debian, etc.), I'm really new to the Sun architecture and feel at a loss as to how to make this work. Continued suggestions/help would be really appreciated. Thanks so much, Daniel On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, Pieter Krul wrote: > Daniel Freedman wrote: > > > So, maybe my problem is that I haven't created a "Sun disk label", and I'm > > not really sure how to do so. I didn't see any explicit mention of this in > > the installation instructions for the sparc port of potato, but maybe I'm > > missing something. > > Boot from the cdrom and when you're in fdisk, use option 's' > to create a new Sun disklabel. > You can probably follow the defaults fdisk comes up with. > > Pieter My initial message: I'm trying to install Debian 2.2r0_CDa on a newly-acquired used SparcStation 5 (110MHz, 256 Mb RAM, 2 Seagate 2.1 Gb HD, Rom Rev. 2.24). I'm booting off the CD-ROM to start the installation process, and I'm successfully getting most of the way through (partitioning of disks, configuration of modules, installation of base, etc.) until I'm asked to reboot to install the remainder of packages (or first create rescue floppy if this doesn't work). I'm not able to create the rescue floppy (it fails on trying) and the reboot doesn't recognize the boot disk with the following error: Boot device:/iommu/sbus/[EMAIL PROTECTED],8400000/[EMAIL PROTECTED],8800000/[EMAIL PROTECTED],0 File and args: Bad magic number in disk label Can't open disk label package Can't open boot device
