Ken Tabb (ken@psy.herts.ac.uk)
Thu, 3 Feb 2000 12:39:49 +0000
Hi everyone,
firstly, thanks to everyone who helped with the (previous!) YDL CS1.1
install problems on the ANS 500 (using Scott Every's ins.ydl.coff from a
floppy) - Steve Leventhal cracked it by noting that I was using the power
button to restart instead of switching it off at the mains (now why
didn't I think of that!).
Once I did that (and re-did the battery ritual) all worked fine off the
floppy, except to say that there are 2 internal disks; 1x2Gb with AIX on
and 1x4Gb unformatted (I believe, or at least wipeable). In the initial
black screen stage with Tux in the top left it was whizzing along but got
stuck with the AIX disk, displaying the following infinite loop (well I
assume infinite... I didn't wait for all of infinity!):
ncr53c825a-0:<2,0> phase change 6-7 ncr53c825a-0:<2,0> phase change 6-7 7@005fecb0 resid=4
ncr53c825a-0:SCSI change error fixup: CCB already dequeued (0xc05fe820)
ncr53c825a-0:restart (scsi reset).
ncr53c825a-0:Downloading SCSI SCRIPTS.
... that's not a problem for the moment, I thought, I'll reformat it
later, and I restarted without the AIX disk in. I then got into the
installer, but when it got to the disk formatting stage, I was presented
with an fdisk impersonator. It definitely isn't fdisk (or at least not
like the MkLinux one or what's in the YellowDog manual), and I hadn't
selected Disk Druid. It's pretty similar to fdisk, but the commands are
different (eg. 'n' for create new partition not 'c')
It was listing the 4Gb disk as /temp/sda, but when I went in said there
was no valid DOS partition table, nor Sun or SGI disklabel (possibly
true) and that it was building a new DOS disklabel. If, from the
fdisk-type command line I print the partition table, it tells me there
are 133 heads, 62 sectors, 1017 cylinders and that Units = cylinders of
8246 * 512 bytes. OK, I thought, and continued to make 3 partitions:
Device Boot Start End Blocks ID System
/tmp/sda1 * 2 900 3706577 83 Linux
/tmp/sda2 901 953 218519 83 Linux <-to
be used for installing
/tmp/sda3 954 1017 263872 82 Linux swap
...went to write changes to disk and quit, and after 'syncing disks' it
went back into the installer window listing the drives which could be
formatted. When I went back in to look at the disk, there's still no
partition map (or partitions, of course). It also doesn't seem to allow
me to set names for the partitions (eg. 'swap', 'linux', 'wibble' etc.)
Qu'est-ce que c'est le probleme ici?!! I've even tried just letting it
write the DOS disklabel (no partitions), writing changes & quitting,
going back in, and still no disklabel. Do I want a Sun / BSD disklabel
instead?
Disk Druid equally gives up, saying "The partition table on drive sda is
corrupted. To create new partitions it must be initialised, causing the
loss of ALL DATA on this drive". When I 'Initialise' it disappears
fleetingly then comes back to the same screen.
Thanks once more for helping this fool!
Ken
---------
Ken Tabb.
Mac & UNIX C/C++/Java developer (Health & Human Sciences),
Machine Vision researcher/programmer (Computer Science),
University of Hertfordshire, Herts AL10 9AB, England
Tel: (+44 / 0) 1707 286171 e-mail: ken@psy.herts.ac.uk
http://www.health.herts.ac.uk/ken/
Created in a Microsoft-free environment
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