problem installing redhat on pSeries 610

[Tom Gall]

Hi Christian,

   If you're feeling desperate and a bit adventurous it can be done.

On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 01:06 PM, Christian Foerster wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> thanks for the info. Wouldn't it be possible to load the install
> kernel from the scsi harddisk or over ethernet?

Exactly.   Or via a SCSI CDROM, they aren't that hard to find.

> What would the syntax be like in open firmware for booting over the
> ethernet?

Yes that would work too.

>  Which filesystems does open firmware support?

Not much. Essentially MSDOS (for grabbing off of floppy) and ISO9660.
Yaboot on the other hand has the brain to read ext2, ext3, Reiser and
so on.

>  I've got two scsi harddisk in the p610. One of them contains a AIX
> 5.1 Installation. The other one is empty. Can I just copy the redhat
> install files to the scsi harddisk with AIX installed and boot from
> that? How would the OF syntax look like in this case?

Hmmm  well you'd need to cross build some utilities on AIX, like fdisk,
the e2fsprogs ... but probably not toooo hard in the grand scheme of
things. You might consider looking at the linux from scratch web site.


>
> Any help is appreciated, since we don't have a scsi cd-rom drive here
> to boot from. Also we really would like to install redhat on this
> machine, since we are all familiar with it. Open firmware is still a
> bit tricky for us.

There's alot of ways to do this. Funny you should hit this as I'm just
in the midst of constructing a HOWTO on building bootable CDROMs ...
once you get past the tricky bits it's not too hard and also using that
route it wouldn't be hard to build your own install route using your
own kernel and raving the other bits off the RedHat CD.

here's the whirl wind tour.

Notice the ppc directory, note the bootinfo.txt that tells your box
what fire up first via that script.  You can invoke that script the
following way from OF

boot cdrom:,\ppc\bootinfo.txt

This is also the script that automatically runs when boot off of the CD
from say the multiboot menu.

or you can actually run yaboot directly off of CD. (make sure your
yaboot you have built has had addnote run on it)

so

boot cdrom:,yaboot  for instance would fire off yaboot from the top dir

and/or

you could build a kernel and put it on CD

boot cdrom:,\vmlinux  <kernel params here>

would boot that

and of course if you're using yaboot then you can easily specify an
initrd etc etc etc and you're into install-o-rama, or of course do that
via passing things as kernel parameters.

Anyway to build an iso that will work do the following:

(assemble parts into a directory)

mkisofs -v -v -r -T -U -l <directory to wrap up into the iso>  -o
output.iso

Record to 650 Meg media. NOT 700!

Apologies if this is a little fast for you.

Anyway ... plan to write and publish a real PPC ISO HOWTO in the next
week or so.

have fun!

Tom

> Thanks, Christian
>
Tom Gall - [Embedded] [PPC64 | PPC32] Linux
Peace, Love & Linux                   "Where's the kaboom? There was
Technology Center                       supposed to be an earth
shattering
(w) tom_gall at vnet.ibm.com       kaboom! " -- Marvin Martian
(h) tgall at rochcivictheatre.org


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