filesystem for Alpha / aboot

[yngwin]

I'm trying (again) to get Gentoo Linux on my Alpha (PW433au - Miata). I have put an other IDE harddisk in it, which used to work fine on my PentiumII. I made the partitions according to the handbook.

Now I have a problem with which filesystem to put on it. I tried ext3, but that seems extremely unstable: I get file corruptions. 2 out of 3 times the stage I download is corrupted (as md5sum shows). Even when it goes well, some time later in the install something goes wrong and I get "illegal instruction" errors on simple things like ls.

I tried reiserfs, which in itself works fine, but aboot cannot boot it, even when I make a special ext2 /boot partition - because it needs to read a file on /etc.

My next option would be UFS, but that doesn't work yet with linux

Anyone here with an idea? Or should I just put a BSD on it?

[ddew]

When I installed gentoo on my alpha (a PWS500a), I ended up skipping the boot partition and using only root instead, it was easiest to get aboot working then.

Another tip to ensure proper functionality for aboot is to start the partitions quite late on the disk, like sector 3 or even 5.

Other than that ext3 worked fine for me.

gl

[yngwin]

I tried that, but ext3 doesn't work for me. I blame the fs (in combination with who knows what), as I don't see what else is too blame.

It seems I'm stuck:
- SRM will only boot aboot, as far as I know - or are there alternatives?
- And aboot will only boot ext2/3 or ufs. Ext3 doesn't work for me, I'd like to use reiserfs, but how do I get that booted? And ufs doesn't seem an option (yet) for Linux.

Well, I may look into a boot floppy alternative. Otherwise it will be some form of BSD that gets on my Alpha. I'd really hoped Gentoo would work...

[ddew]

You can give MILO a try, haven't tried it myself but it's an option atleast.

[jeffd]

Are you trying to boot from the IDE disk?
If so, I'm pretty sure you can't do that. Try booting from a SCSI disk instead. Use your IDE drive for data.

[yngwin]

Oh yes, I can boot from an IDE disk - I have no other. It had an older IDE disk with BSD on it and that booted just fine.

It occured to me that it may also be a RAM problem, but I haven't had time lately to test this and/or try other things.

[airbatica]

Aboot can only boot a partition that is formatted as ext2/3, but you can work around that with the seperate /boot and root partitions. Easiest workaround to use your filesystem of choice (on the root partition) is to make a /etc directory inside your /boot directory and copy aboot.conf to that. You can use Reiserfs or anything else (except JFS which is b0rked) on your root partition. I've even used Root Software RAID using the above method.

If you're getting illegal instructions, you've either got a hardware problem, or an issue with CFLAGS. I can't remember what CPU the Miata uses, but I would look into that first. If the Miata uses an EV5, and you compiled for an EV56 or higher, then you'll run into that issue. If you're sure your CFLAGS are right, then it may be a hardware issue.

[AS2100]

I have a DEC PWS 600au and in the beginning I was unable to get ext3 to work on an IDE drive (I was missing the SCSI controller at the time). Dont laugh too hard but what I did was take out the drive and stick it in a Windows box and used that to delete all the partition data and create one large NTFS partition. Then I put the disk back in the PWS and refdisked it creating BSD partitions and started with sector 5 and everything worked OK.

Just a suggestion,
Matthew

[pmarques]

I had a lot of trouble installing Gentoo on my Alpha Worstation 500au with an IDE hard Drive: file systems corrupted, errors when compiling, etc

All the problems went away when I disabled DMA in my hard drive:
hdparm -d 0 /dev/hda

Pablo