Re: [cobalt-users] Raq4 - Kernel 2.4 Upgrade Woes

[Duncan Laurie <duncan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Josh Trutwin wrote:
> Hi,
>
> This could get long so I'm going to try to be as brief as I can, let me
> know where I left out important information...
>
> Thru a shrewd business deal, I recently became a proud owner of a Raq4,
> specifically a Raq4r with 2 40 GB IDE drives, SCSI and RAID.  For a
> variety of reasons I won't get into, I decided to install Debian on it.  I
> took my instructions from these sites: 
> ftp://ftp-eng.cobalt.com/pub/users/thockin/2.4/ http://www.apoxx.org and
> http://list.cobalt.com/pipermail/cobalt-users/2002-June/071213.html.

To start with, here is another howto on installing debian:

	http://cobalt.iceblink.org/debian/debian-cobalt-howto.txt

> 2.) I did NOT install a new ROM Kernel from Tim Hockin's ftp site, the
> instructions for both Debian and Slackware did not specify this as a
> required step, only to flash the BIOS.  Is this correct or should I have
> installed one of his 2.4 kernels when flashing the BIOS.  If I should
> have, are my only options to install from NFS or Serial?

The ROM kernel is contained in the 'BIOS'.  See
	http://cobalt.iceblink.org/rom/
for more technical information on how this works.

> 3.) Does it matter where in the hard drive /dev/hda1 is?  Somewhere I
> think I remember reading to use the last cylinders of the hard drive.  I
> used the beginning of the hard drive during my partitioning.

Nope, this should not matter.  What does matter is that your root
partition matches what the ROM reads from CMOS.  If this box was
originally a RaQ 4R then it used raid and the ROM should be
configured with "md1" as the root device.  If you are not using
raid, then you need to change it to "hda1".  On 2.3.40 it is done
like this:


Press spacebar to enter ROM mode

Cobalt:Main Menu> boot

Cobalt:Boot Menu> read_boot_dev
md1

Cobalt:Boot Menu> set_boot_dev hda1

Cobalt:Boot Menu> read_boot_dev
hda1


After this is done you may need to reboot before it will register
the change completely.


> 4.) Long shot:  Does it matter what jumper settings I have on the disk
> drives?  These are 2 40 GB drives, but I had to enable a jumper to set the
> size to 32 GB in order for my AMD's BIOS to recognize the drives.

It looks like linux reads the partition table ok, so this shouldn't
be a problem:

Partition check:
 hdc: [PTBL] [1027/255/63] hdc1 hdc2 hdc3 hdc4 < hdc5 hdc6 hdc7 hdc8 >

-duncan