Re: Booting a 5000/240 from CD

I believe the problem is that you have a valid disklabel when you try to 
write the image to the disk. I've come across this problem before, though 
on other platforms running *BSD. Try to wipe the disklabel by writing 
zeros to /dev/rsdXc, reboot and then try to write the image to /dev/rsdXc

It is important that you write the image to the raw device, thus rsd 
rather than sd. Also, slice c is the whole disk on most platforms with 
i386 being one exception. The c (or d on i386) slice is automatically 
assumed to be the whole disk by the kernel even if there isn't a valid 
disklabel present.

Cheers,
Anders

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Anders Hogrelius, MSc
Senior Exploration Geologist
TM Resources AB (Tumi Resources ltd)
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On Wed, 7 Nov 2007, Louis Wevers wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Ok, I've gotten to the part of trying to write the image to a spare drive. 
> First I emptied the whole disk and created a partion on it using disklabel 
> and formatted it using newfs. The output of "dislabel -r sd5" looks like 
> this:
>
> # disklabel -r sd5
>
> # /dev/rsd5c:
> type: SCSI
> disk: RZ58     (C) DE
> label: NetBSD
> flags:
> bytes/sector: 512
> sectors/track: 85
> tracks/cylinder: 15
> sectors/cylinder: 1275
> cylinders: 2112
> total sectors: 2698061
> rpm: 3600
> interleave: 1
> trackskew: 0
> cylinderskew: 0
> headswitch: 0           # microseconds
> track-to-track seek: 0  # microseconds
> drivedata: 0
>
> 5 partitions:
> #        size    offset     fstype  [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
> a:   2698061         0       boot                      # (Cyl.    0 - 2116*)
> c:   2698061         0     unused      0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 2116*)
>
> So, then I tried to write the image to it using dd:
>
> # dd if=/dev/cd0a of=/dev/sd5a
> dd: /dev/sd5a: Read-only file system
> 4+0 records in
> 3+0 records out
> 1536 bytes transferred in 0.131 secs (11725 bytes/sec)
>
> I also tried using /dev/rsd5a as device and using a chmod 777 on /dev/sd5a; 
> all with the same result. So, poking around a bit I tried using installboot 
> to write anything to the disk:
>
> # installboot -v /dev/rsd5a /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffs
> File system:         /dev/rsd5a
> File system type:    raw (blocksize 8192, needswap 0)
> Primary bootstrap:   /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffs
> Bootstrap start sector: 1
> Bootstrap sector count: 15
> Bootstrap load address: 0x80700000
> Bootstrap exec address: 0x80700000
> Writing bootstrap
> Writing boot block
> installboot: Writing `/dev/rsd5a': Read-only file system
> installboot: Set bootstrap operation failed
>
> So, the big question that remains for me is, how do I get my filesystem not 
> to be read-only?
>
> Many thanks in advance.
>
> Louis
>
> Henry Bent wrote:
>> On Mon, 5 Nov 2007, Louis Wevers wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> Perhaps a bit stupid question, but I can't seem to figure it out. I try
>>> to boot my 5000/240 from a freshly created CD (created from the ISO
>>> image available from the NetBSD site).
>>> 
>>> I tried something like: "boot 3/rz0" and "boot 3/rz0/netbsd"
>>> 
>>> Unfortunately it only comes back to me with something like: "?IO: 3/rz0
>>>        (cmd: rd)"
>>> 
>>> When I boot the installed 1.6 on the machine, I can read the CD
>>> properly. file structure looks normal etc.
>>> 
>>> Any ideas on how to boot the machine from CD?
>>> 
>>> Many thanks in advance,
>>> Louis
>>> 
>> 
>> Hi Louis,
>> 
>> You need a CD-ROM drive that can do 512 byte hardware sectors if you want
>> to boot from it.  There's a list of them at
>> http://home.comcast.net/~safeharborbay/c128/scsi/suncds.html but I have
>> no affiliation with that site and can't guarantee anything.  I personally
>> have used RRD42s and various Toshiba models in the past.
>> 
>> If that fails and you have an extra SCSI hard drive, you can just dd a CD
>> image to the hard drive and boot off of that.  I've done it a few times
>> and neither Ultrix nor NetBSD seem to mind that you're not using a real
>> CD-ROM.
>> 
>> --
>> Henry Bent
>> [email protected]
>> 
>> 
>
>