Alpha Boot Question

[djanello]

I just installed gentoo on my XP1000 using the release candidate LiveCD and the experimental build from July 29.

Everything was fine, but when I try to reboot using the command string

boot dka0 -file 2/vmlinux.gz

I get the following message:

VFS: cannot open root device "sda2" or 08:02. Please append a correct root bootpath
Kernel panic.

I tried using aboot directly like this:

b boot/vmlinux.gz -root=/dev/sda2

but got the same error.

I rebooted using the LiveCD, mounted the /dev/sda2 install partition, and poked around with ls and fdisk to see what was there, everything seems OK on the disk so it does not look like a hard disk error.

Any ideas?

David A. Janello
Simulation and Searches, LLC

[backebergd]

You need to get two things right to boot the alpha:

You need to feed the SRM the right disk and file, and then the bootloader has to be able to find the kernel image and boot it properly.

Some possibilities at the SRM level:
do a "show boot*" and you will see the various things you can set

bootdef_dev
boot_file
boot_osflags

These can also be set temporarily in one big command:

b(oot) dka0 -fi 2/vmlinuz-2.4.24 -fl root=/dev/sda2

You change variables with the set command, and view them with the show command. If your changes don't persist between reboots you have a dead BIOS battery.

aboot also needs to be configured properly, see /etc/aboot.conf
also, any partition that you want aboot to be able to read needs to be ext2/ext3, or something else it can read. To the best of my knowledge, aboot can't read reiserfs for instance.