Can't boot to SCSI device...

[Tim Seufert]

On Friday, December 20, 2002, at 04:47  AM, Romeyn Prescott wrote:

> At 2:12 PM -0800 12/19/02, Tim Seufert scribbled:
>> On Thursday, December 19, 2002, at 12:10  PM, Romeyn Prescott wrote:
>>
>>> I've tried booting from the 2.2 CD per instructions on the web site 
>>> and using "boot-cd root=/dev/sda7" (and sda5) to no avail.  All I 
>>> get are "Invalid device" errors.
>>
>> What is saying "invalid device"?  Open Firmware, yaboot, or the Linux 
>> kernel?
>
> I get "Invalid Device" when I try the "boot-cd......" command above. 
> pdisk in OS 9 shows me that sda is, in fact, what I want.

OK... from what I can see, boot-cd is not a valid boot target (on YDL 
2.3, at least, perhaps they removed it in 2.3).  What do you see if you 
hit tab at the prompt? (tab will list the available choices)

BTW, pdisk under OS 9 doesn't always get Linux disk names right, 
particularly with IDE disks... if you have only a single SCSI disk 
you're probably safe though.

One thing you could try is to boot once via BootX.  This is not a 
recommended boot technique for any New World Mac, and probably won't 
even work on more recent machines, but I think you said you have a B&W 
so you may be able to get into Linux long enough to run ybin and 
restart.

Another thing to try is creating a bootstrap partition by hand while in 
MacOS.  This isn't as difficult as you might think, especially since 
you have an IDE drive you can mangle however you want during attempts 
to bring the system up.  Install it as the master, and create a HFS 
partition to use for bootstrapping.  Copy "vmlinux" and "yaboot" from 
the "install" directory on the YDL CD to the root level of your 
bootstrap partition.  Now you have to create a yaboot configuration 
file, so create yaboot.conf (also at the root level of your bootstrap 
partition) with BBEdit Lite or some other plaintext editor.  (Or you 
can copy the yaboot.conf from the CD and edit it if you like.)  The 
contents should look something like this:

image=hd:9,\\vmlinux
     label=linux
     root=/dev/sda7

The example assumes the constructed bootstrap partition is hda9 -- 
change the '9' to whatever number is appropriate.  Note that if the 
partition number is 10 or higher, some versions of Open Firmware use 
hexadecimal numbering for partitions, so you may have to use 'a' 
instead of '10', 'b' instead of '11', and so forth.

Once you've got all this done, boot into Open Firmware (hold down 
cmd+option+O+F immediately after turning the computer on or restarting 
until you see the OF command prompt).  Type:

boot hd:9,yaboot

(once again substituting the appropriate partition number for '9') and 
yaboot should load.  Press return and it will boot the default "image" 
from yaboot.conf, which will be the first one listed, in this case the 
only one.   The "image" entry simply tells yaboot to load the Linux 
kernel from the bootstrap partition, and to tell the kernel that the 
root FS is sda7.

If this process doesn't work I'll try to help you get through it... but 
I'll be away from email for Christmas and other things, so hopefully 
you won't have any problems.