John Turnbull wrote: > > I am attempting to install potato on a Sparc 2 (64M Ram, 410M HD). I am > using the rescue floppy and the root floppy and getting the rest via nfs > from a local machine. My background is Linux - mostly RedHat/Mandrake on > i386 architecture machines. > > 9/10ths of the install seems to go fine, but I cannot make a boot floppy > and the hard drive boot setup seems to fail. > > Now I suspect that I may have done the fdisk thing wrong and hosed the > first cylinder (which I now understand is not good on a Sun). > > Originally, I had a 8M /boot partition starting at 0 and the a 64M swap > and the rest as /. > > Then I tried 8M /boot starting at 1, then 64 M swap and the rest /. > > Did I need to do something to 'unhose' the first cylinder? > > What reasons are there for failure to make a boot floppy (I did try two > different new floppies). John T
Thank you all for your assistance. The nut of the problem was that I was attempting to treat Sun hardware like Intel stuff. Specifically. Having a small boot partition is more trouble than it is worth. You need to have both /boot and /etc on the same partition if you want to have an easy life. The man pages for silo mention something about not using cylinder 0, So I had started my first partition at 1. Well that will prevent booting off the hard disk. So I am back to a large / in /dev/sda1 and a swap in /dev/sda2 and /usr on /dev/sdb1. Now I can boot off of the hard disk/. I still have not managed to make a boot floppy during the install, but I can live with that. Is there any sparc specific documentation auto installed, or that I should install. I would like to know something about the differences in X configuration and serial ports. John T
