Date: Sun, 12 Sep 1999 11:34:03 +0100 (BST) From: Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com> To: John Brann <john@brann.org> Cc: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Installing on an old Alpha without a floppy Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9909121129490.53068-100000@salmon.nlsystems.com> In-Reply-To: <19990908144652.A7900@freebie.brann.org>
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On Wed, 8 Sep 1999, John Brann wrote: > Hi, > > I have access to an old alpha workstation (a 266, I think) which I'd like > to try FreeBSD on. > > uname -mrsv shows: > > OSF1 V3.2 41 alpha > > The machine has no floppy drive, and its CD seems not to be working > (attempts to mount a CD are greeted with I/O errors). > > I read recently a trick for booting from the swap partition, so I downloaded > the boot.flp image, shut down to single user mode, dd'd the floppy into the > swap partition. I then rebooted and resirected the boot to the swap partition > by specifying the device node name. > > The message I got was 'Invalid a.out image' (I'm paraphrasing) > > That made me think that the boot loader could only load an a.out kernel, > and that I'm stuck. > > Any other ideas, or is anything obviously wrong here? You can't boot from just any partition on the alpha. The firmware only looks at the first sector of the disk to decide how to boot. What you could do is copy the contents of the file boot.flp to the start of a spare drive using dd and then try booting from that. -- Doug Rabson Mail: dfr@nlsystems.com Nonlinear Systems Ltd. Phone: +44 181 442 9037 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
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