XL-266 install

[Sullivan, Glenn]

Here is a post that I made a while ago with my steps to get RedHat 7.2 on my
XL-266...

Hope this helps,

Glenn Sullivan, MCSE+I  MCDBA
David Clark Company Inc. 


<-------Old Post---------->
A little background: the workstation in question has a 1 gig SCSI drive, a 2
gig SCSI drive, a SCSI CDROM and a Matrox Millennium II video card.  I have
NT4 installed onto the first hard drive (the 1 gig drive) and wanted to
leave it there to play with, so I am only dealing with the second drive.  So
your system may differ...

First I made a MILO boot floppy, by downloading the correct MILO from:
http://www.suse.de/~stepan/binaries/2.2-18/
and putting it onto a MS-DOS formatted floppy (but name the milo file MILO),
along with linload.exe, which I don't remember where I got it.

Then I made a DRVBLOCK floppy, by RAWRITEing the DRVBLOCK.IMG file to a
floppy.  You may find DRVBLOCK.IMG in the images folder of the RH 7.2
Install Disc 1.  I guess you can also use dd to create the floppy, but like
I said, I'm a windows guy.

Then, I made a boot option in my ARC menu to boot MILO from the floppy.  I
have copied and pasted these directions from the RH7.2-alpha Installation
Guide:
<--------Snip------------->
At the boot menu, select the option Supplementary menu. 

Next, select the command: Set up the system, which takes you to the Setup
Menu. From here, select the command Manage boot selection menu, which takes
you to the Boot Selections Menu. 

You need to add a boot command to load MILO from the diskette you created.
Choose the command Add a boot selection. 

You should see several devices listed. To select the A: drive, choose Floppy
Disk 0. 

Next, enter the name of the OS loader to use. Enter \linload.exe as the OS
loader directory and name. The MILO disk you created has the linload.exe
file on it, and the correct MILO for your Alpha machine class. The MILO
command is always named milo on the diskette, and both files should reside
in the root directory of the diskette. 

Select the yes option when you are asked if the operating system is on the
same partition as the OS loader (it is, both are in the root directory), and
enter \ as the operating system root directory. As the name of the boot
selection, enter something descriptive like MILO Diskette to indicate that
this entry boots MILO from the diskette drive. 

If prompted, select no to indicate that you do not want to start the
debugger at boot time. 

You should now be back in the boot selections menu. Press [Esc] to get back
to the Boot Selections Menu. Choose the option Supplementary menu, and save
changes to commit the changes to NVRAM. Once you have saved your boot entry,
[Esc] will get you back to the boot menu and you can now attempt to boot
MILO. 

You should have a boot selection that looks something like this: 

LOADIDENTIFIER=Linux
SYSTEMPARTITION=multi(0)disk(0)fdisk(0)
OSLOADER=multi(0)disk(0)fdisk(0)\linload.exe
OSLOADPARTITION=multi(0)disk(0)fdisk(0)\
OSLOADOPTIONS=

This boot selection enables ARC to boot into MILO from the diskette using
the linload.exe OS loader.
<--------Snip------------->

Boot into MILO.

Now we start the install from the CD-ROM.  At the milo prompt, I used the
following command:
boot scd0:/kernels/vmlinux.gz root=/dev/scd0 initrd=/images/ramdisk.img

NOTE: I found out that my graphics card runs the graphical setup just fine,
so didn't need to add the keyword TEXT to run the install in text mode.
YMMV.

In order to be able to install from the CD, I needed to load a new SCSI
driver.  I went into the SCSI CD-ROM screen, and hit f2, and inserted my
DRVBLOCK.IMG disk.  I chose the last driver on the list (the ncr53x8xx
driver, I believe) for my built in SCSI interface.

I used FDisk to partition the second drive.  I created 4 partitions:
1. 5MB vfat, mounted as /dos, to hold MILO
2. 20MB ext2, mounted as /boot, for the kernels
3. 256MB swap (I have 128 meg or RAM)
4. Remainder, ext2, mounted as /

I created a separate /boot partition because I figured out (by trial and
error) that milo does not like large partitions, so I needed the kernel in a
smaller one to be able to boot to it from MILO.

After all the packages were installed, I hit ctrl-alt-f2 to switch to the
command prompt.  I did the following:
cd /mnt/sysimage/dos
mcopy a:linload.exe
mcopy a:milo

This copies MILO and LINLOAD to the first partition on the second drive
(mounted as /dos, remember?) so we don't need to keep booting off the
floppy.

Then I switched back to the graphical interface with ctrl-alt-f7 and hit
"Exit"

After reboot, I create a new ARC boot entry to point to the first partition
on the second SCSI disk, and boot milo from there.  In the OSLOADOPTIONS
variable, I put the following:
boot sdb2:vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb4 initrd=initrd.img

Now my machine boots directly to RH7.2.

Hope this helps someone...

Glenn Sullivan
David Clark Company Inc.