Date: Wed, 10 May 2000 16:59:13 -0600 From: "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@kdm.org> To: Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com> Cc: Mike Smith <msmith@freebsd.org>, obrien@freebsd.org, Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com>, alpha@freebsd.org Subject: Re: borked Alpha boot loader? Message-ID: <20000510165913.A29033@panzer.kdm.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0005100928190.47945-100000@salmon.nlsystems.com>; from dfr@nlsystems.com on Wed, May 10, 2000 at 09:28:41AM %2B0100 References: <200005092359.QAA21039@mass.cdrom.com> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0005100928190.47945-100000@salmon.nlsystems.com>
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I appreciate all the suggestions for fixing my botched loader.
For those reading the archives, here is what I did to fix it:
- downloaded the 4.0 bindist and boot floppies
- untarred the bindist into a directory
- got netbooting up and running:
in /etc/inetd.conf:
tftp dgram udp wait root /usr/libexec/tftpd tftpd -l -s /a/ken/dl/freebsd/4.0 /
bootps dgram udp wait root /usr/libexec/bootpd bootpd -d 4 -c /a/ken/dl/freebsd/4.0 /etc/bootptab
in /etc/bootptab:
subway.plutotech.com: \
:ht=ethernet:ha=0000f8757c14: \
:ip=206.168.67.172:sm=255.255.255.128: \
:sa=206.168.67.147:bf=boot/netboot:rp=/a/ken/dl/freebsd/4.0: \
:vm=rfc1048
- vnconfig and mounted boot.flp from the 4.0 distribution
- copied the kernel.gz from boot.flp out into the root directory of the
untarred bindist, and decompressed it
- 'boot ewa0' on the PWS 433
- go into fixit and start the emergency holographic shell
- mount_nfs the filesystem with the 4.0 bindist
- set the PATH so I can use ls, df, etc.
- use 'mount' from the 4.0 bindist to mount the root FreeBSD parition on
the 433au box. I had to use the da1a device node from the /dev directory
in the bindist.
- go into /boot on the root FreeBSD partition and copy the working loader
(/boot/loader.old) on top of the broken loader (/boot/loader)
- reboot, and everything works!
Of course I've now done a 'disklabel -B da1' so I can specify another
loader and won't have this problem again.
Along the way, I tried to netboot the 'kernel.GENERIC' from the 4.0
bindist, but I discovered that it setting the boot_askname variable in the
loader doesn't work on Alpha boxes, or at least not from the netboot
loader. So every time I booted up with that kernel, it would panic because
it couldn't find init. (Since I couldn't tell it where the root device
was. Setting rootdev in the loader didn't seem to help either, and lsdev
only found net0, nothing else.)
I did get a set of CDs from Justin, but unfortunately they were the i386
CDs, and so they wouldn't help in this situation. That's probably the
easiest way to fix the problem, if you've got access to Alpha CDs.
Ken
--
Kenneth Merry
ken@kdm.org
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