Re: Installing NetBSD onto a Motorola PowerStack Series E

On 2003.07.29 13:16 Chesterton Andrew-BLUW13 wrote:

> Can Anybody Help?
Depends? ;-) 

> I have a Motorola PowerStack Series E Machine, Model E604-100P.
What kind of firmware does it have? Maybe OpenFirmWare? 

> The blurb that I have about the PowerStack says that the motherboard 
> is fully compliant with the PowerPC Reference Platform Spec (Rev1.0).
The PReP spec is a bit vague, IMHO. It leaves some space for
implementation dependent bits, like interrupt handling. 

> The last couple of lines on the screen are shown below:
> 
> Md0: internal 2048KB image area
> Boot device: <unknown>
> Root on md0a dumps on md0b
> Trap: kernel ISI by 0xbf8002e0 (SRR1 0x40009032)
> Panic: trap
> Syncing disks ... done
> Dumpsys: TBD
> Rebooting ...
So it does print all the lines about found devices?
What devices did it find?
It seams that it crashes when it tries to mount the root-fs. This is
quite a lot for an unknowen machine. The problem may be the interrupt
handling. The NetBSD kernel needs to know a few machine dependent bits
about your particular type of hardware. It shoud be easy to fix with a
bit kernel hacking and hardware documentation. 

> I have tried booting the machine headless using a serial cable to trap
> the screen output, but as soon as the machine starts to boot from the
> floppy, it doesn't output anything else via the serial cable, if there
> is a way to get round this problem, then I could post all the screen
> information.
You need a kernel with console hardwired to com0. Try sysinst_com0.fs

> I am new to the Linux operating system,
This is not Linux. This is a NetBSD mailing list. Linux and NetBSD are
two independent and different operating systems. They both are free and
Unix-like, but thats all they have in common. 
-- 


tschüß,
       Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/