Shurik: > I've made some additional testing and found out that dbootstrap just segfaults > while trying to "Configure the Base System". First of all, its PID changes > when it goes to the initial message. That meens, I guess, it was restarted > (the same behaviour if I kill it by hands). So I've try to execute it from VT2 > and got that "segmentation fault" message I was expecting. VT2 became unusable > afterwards, so I had to boot from floppy again. > > Could it be something wrong with my hardware configuration? I'm installing > Linux on sda4. sda1 is Solaris and sda2 is swap. Are there some limitations > on that?
I've had exactly the same experience: configure_base() seems to cause the process to die, and it doesn't get as far as writing /target/etc/fstab, though the file was created, it seems. Could it be that is_nfs_partition() does it? It uses code in libfdisk/ which is reasonably complex and might contain an undetected architecture-dependent bug. I'm just guessing wildly. My work-around was to go to VT2, write /target/etc/fstab manually, then remove /target/sbin/unconfigured,sh, so that dbootstrap thinks that the base system has been configued. (It hasn't really; there are several other things that dbootstrap would have done.) # cat > /target/etc/fstab # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> /dev/sda2 / ext2 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1 /dev/sda1 none swap sw 0 0 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 # mv /target/sbin/unconfigured.sh /target/sbin/unconfigured.sh.hide # I now have a working system that boots off the boot floppy. (Just as well I didn't miss out that step!) Can anyone tell me how to boot without using a floppy, if that's possible? Or is at least possible to read the kernel off the hard drive, even if SILO has to come off a floppy? I put Debian GNU/Linux on a nice new Fujitsu drive with SCSI ID 0. Most of my attempts to boot using it, either from the PROM or the SILO prompt, result in a "Bad magic number in disk label". Edmund