Yes another stupid question for this list...
We have an AlphaStation 250 4/266 with 2 meg RAM. It has two DEC SCSI
drives, a CD-ROM drive, and a floppy drive. We have been booting it off
floppy disk using MILO. We'd like to eliminate the floppy from the boot
process. We can't blow MILO into flash because we need to keep the DEC SRM
firmware intact. So we decided to go with aboot on one of the hard drives...
Downloaded aboot-0.5 from azstarnet. Used minlabel to repartition the
system disk so that 8MB of unpartitioned space is present at the start of the
disk. Ran the command "swriteboot /dev/sdb bootlx" to write aboot to the
system disk. Compiled a kernel using "make boot" and copied the resulting
vmlinux.gz to the root directory. Shutdown and rebooted.
Gave SRM commands "set boot_defdev dka100.1.0.6.0", "set boot_file
1/vmlinux.gz", "set boot_osflags root=/dev/sdb1", and finally, "boot dka1".
The SRM found a valid boot block, loaded it, and booted it. aboot put up a
small banner and loaded the kernel. The kernel started to boot.
That is where things got funky. The kernel boot process seems much slower
then when under MILO. It tends to stop and think for a couple seconds on the
serial driver init, for example. Under MILO it was nearly instant. Then,
when the kernel reaches the SCSI driver (BSD NCR SCSI port, 1.18f), it blows
up completely. The driver keeps giving "Aborted command due to timeout"
errors and something about "Test Unit Ready".
Does anyone have any idea what might be wrong?
----
Ben Scott <bscott@leonardo.sr.unh.edu>
Technical support staff
Space Science Center
University of New Hampshire