Alpha aboot help needed

Alpha4100User · n00b Joined: 03 May 2004 Posts: 4

Hi,
I've been able to get my Alpha 4100 booted using the LiveCD and install stage1 from the experimental area and go through to the part where you're supposed to type 'reboot' and enjoy.

There is no joy here, however!

reboot reboots into the CD again (no biggie, I can just do a 'halt' and boot dkd0 (my /dev/sda disk).

When I try to boot to my new install, the aboot loader can't find the root and just hangs (another handy use for the 'halt' button).

I've built a kernel using the manual process as well as using 'genkernel'.

It seems to find the boot loader fine and brings me to the aboot menu (purposely, since I didn't set the -flags 0).

My disk configuration is very similar to the excellent install documents, except that I've added a boot partition on sda as well.
4 partitions:
# start end size fstype [fsize bsize cpg]
a: 3 133 131 swap
b: 134 452 319 ext2
c: 1 521 521 unused 0 0
d: 453 520 68 ext2

my /etc/fstab looks like this:

/dev/sda4 /boot ext2 noauto,noatime 1 1
/dev/sda2 / ext2 noatime 0 0
/dev/sda1 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro 0 0

The latest 'aboot.conf' looks like this (the latest kernel is a genkernel flavor):
0:4/boot/vmlinux root=/dev/ram0 real_root=/dev/sda2 init=/linuxrc

What am I doing wrong?

avendesora · Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 12:49 pm Post subject:

You should try compiling the kernel yourself - the initrd seems to be the problem.
Build a kernel that doesn't need an initrd (i.e. d'ont use genkernel) and update your
bootloader to something like:
0:4/boot/vmlinux root=/dev/sda2

LinuxFreakus · n00b Joined: 23 Jan 2004 Posts: 30

I also had some issues with aboot... most of them due to the way I was trying to use a software RAID device as my root (hardware raid was actually slower performance for me), trying to use a ramdisk to accomplish it, and never managed to make it work... so I ended up just using one disk for my boot/root partions and a big RAID 5 with all the other disks for everything else.

Once I cut the ramdisk out and just put my root partition on the same disk it worked fine.

LinuxFreakus · n00b Joined: 23 Jan 2004 Posts: 30

you might also try formatting your boot partition then re-emerging aboot and installing your kernel again, etc... its possible your aboot isn't written to the disk properly or something.

irasnyd · Posted: Sun May 30, 2004 11:57 pm Post subject:

I've been trying to get aboot to boot off my hard drives for quite a while now. I did a "dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/dev/hda" and it booted off of that, so I know that it can boot off the hard disk.

What I did was make a floppy that has my kernel on it, and aboot too.