[cobalt-developers] upgrading hard drive (was Re: Qube2: booting different kernel?)

[warner-qube@xxxxxxxxxx]

> One of the Tech Notes on the Cobalt Developer Network talks about how to
> replace the kernel in your box.
> 
> You can join the CDN for free from www.cobalt.com/partners -> developers.
> 
> Best Regards,
> /Gordon

Thanks for the response. I should have been more clear about what I was trying
to do (as in "I was pretty confused at the time"). Essentially I was trying to
swap out the hard drive in my Qube2 for a larger one, but I was unable to get
the system to boot from the new disk.

It turns out I missed a silly little thing. When I created the filesystem on
the new drive (with 'mke2fs' on an x86 linux box that had a spare IDE slot), I
did so under a newer kernel, 2.3 in fact. 2.2 and beyond add some new ext2
options that are not recognized by the older 2.0.34 kernel in the Qube, and
the recent mke2fs program turns on those options by default. I wasn't able to
figure it out until I booted that x86 system from an ancient redhat 4.1 CD
(kernel 2.0.27), and it gave me an illuminating error message when I tried to
mount the new HD: "EXT2-fs: couldn't mount because of unsupported optional
features". Recreating the filesystems with 'mke2fs -O none', then copying over
the contents of the old drive, produced a Qube2-bootable disk.

I learned a lot about the whole two-stage bootloader process while hunting
through the kernel, trying to figure out where something could be going wrong.
I suspect that the newer Raq's and such already do this, but if not you might
pass along a suggestion to the firmware folks to let the runtime return a
string to the boot prom with an error message (to be displayed to the user)
instead of just a single bit indicating "disk error". Not the kind of thing
you'd ever expect to see outside of a bringup environment, but it would have
solved my problem in a second.

Thanks for building such nifty hardware.. now, off to see if I can get those
kernel patches merged into my 2.3 tree, then starting looking into a Debian
runtime..

cheers,
 -Brian