Nikos Mouat (nikm@conjungi.com)
Thu, 1 Oct 1998 14:46:03 -0700 (PDT)
If it makes you feel better, my machine is now completely hosed too..
here's what happened:
- due to a mysterious phase of the moon, sun spots, or some other strange
circumstance the installer.coff booted and I was able to install onto an
external drive without any difficultly.
- once the install was complete, I setup the pram to boot off of the
external disk and it worked like a charm
- I upgraded to the kernel from dusers and the ethernet and internal disks
were visible. This caused a minor problem because the external disk that
had been /dev/sdb (my root) was now /dev/sde - minor tinkering in single
user mode fixed this (mount -o remount,rw / ; vi /etc/fstab)
- I partitioned and formated the 2 gig internal disk
(pdisk -i; mke2fs /dev/sda3 ; mkswap /dev/sda2)
- I copied over the contents of the external disk to the internal disk
(cp -Rxa or something like that)
- I rebooted from the kernel on /dev/sde3 but mounting the root disk
/dev/sda (from the Quik prompt I did "vmlinux root=/dev/sda3"
which worked fine.
- I tried to run 'quik -v' however it complained about only supported
ext2 filesystems (i thought it was an ext2 filesystem..)
- I spent alot of time trying to get quik to make sda bootible
- after some screwing around, the machine no longer booted and complained
about invalid partitions and then started DEFAULT CATCH-ing again
and would not boot off any disk, internal or external however would
still boot off the floppy
- I tried re-installing using the dusers installer.coff, however it
freezes when selecting FTP or hard disk installation, and NFS and
doesn't seem to want to mount correctly, and CD doesn't recognize the
cdrom in the drive..
- I pulled batteries out for extended periods of time
- I hooked a serial port console up and did:
"set output-device ttya ; set input-device ttya" and rebooted
- now the console on the serial port (with or without a null modem) does
nothing at all (at 9600, 19200, 36400) and I can't get the
monitor/keyboard working again after numourous 'red-button' pushes,
batery removals, you name it.
So I'm waiting for another sunny day to see if the elves inside the ANS
will make things work again.
nm
On Thu, 1 Oct 1998, TeRrAc wrote:
> The boot disk thatbooted my machine once.. isn't working agian.. I am
> trying to recreate the scenerio's that happened leading to thatone phantom
> boot, turning the key switch. removing the battery between tries,
> documenting it all. I am setting up a web site to list all things tried so
> we don't repead ourselves.. once I get it set up I'll give you guys the
> address.. probably tomorrow.
> I really do believe what we are dealing with here is that the installer
> is writing either some variable to the pram or to the floppy itself that
> lets us not boot more than once. this really sux.. I wonder what will be
> the case if we actually get it installed.. I think the keyswitch plays a
> big part in this as well like the AIX installation.
>
> _____________
> |TeRrAc
> |
> |>>>>terrac@slip.net
> |
> |>>>>>www.slip.net/~terrac
> |
> |>>>>>>Kid From Earth With Fresh Beats.
> |__________________________________
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu Dec 10 1998 - 16:55:56 PST