Hello, I apologize for reposting. There were no responses to my earlier message so I thought I would try again.
I am trying to install debian on a sparcstation 1 with 16MB of RAM. >From ftp.debian.org, in the directory pub/debian/dists/unstable/main/disks-sparc/1998-12-07, I downloaded the files base14-1.bin thru base14-2.bin, resc1440.bin, drv1440.bin and root.bin. Using rawrite2, I copied these to floppies. I then booted the sparc with the 'boot floppy' command and at the SILO boot prompt, entered '/fd;/linux' to start the process. After uncompressing the kernel image and detecting the hardware on the machine, I am prompted to insert the root floppy and press enter. When I do this however, the kernel panics, saying that it cannot mount the root files system. Here are the exact messages: ...... Partition check: sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 sda5 sda6 sda7 sda8 sdb: sdb1 sdb2 sdb3 sdb4 sdb5 sdb6 sdb7 sdb8 floppy 0: Warning disk change called early VFS: Insert root floppy and press enter Upon inserting the root floppy and pressing enter: vfs_read_super: bad magic number 0xf1f9e4ad on dev 2/0 kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 2:00 Press L1-A to return to the boot prom Now, while the release notes talk about using root1440.bin, I could find only root.bin in the above ftp directory. Could this be a problem? Also, while I am able to mount the resc1440 and drv1440 floppies as ext2 filesystems, I am not able to mount the root floppy as ext2. Is this correct behaviour? I tried with images from the 1998-03-08 amd 1998-05-25 directories, but in those two cases, I could not even get to the SILO boot: prompt. There were errors in reading from the etc/silo.conf file. All suggestions appreciated. Thanks, Ashok [EMAIL PROTECTED] Any and all help is appreciated.