new to alpha -- having trouble booting new centos install from ha rd-drive following install on ES40

[Dialup Jon Norstog]

--
Allidaho LLC (http://www.allidaho.com)


---------- Original Message -----------
From: Scott Pendergast <SPendergast at csky.com>
To: "'axp-list at redhat.com'" <axp-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 15:45:01 -0400 
Subject: new to alpha -- having trouble booting new centos install from ha
rd-drive following install on ES40

> Hi we've recently inherited some ES40's DS20's and a bunch of DS10L Alpha
> boxes we'd like to run Centos 4.x on and all goes well until the reboot
> following the install.
> 
> I've tried halting at SRM and trying to explicitly boot from the hd 
> but keep getting errors indicating no valid boot block is found on 
> the target drive.
> >From what I've read I suspect it is something to do with aboot, etc.  I'm
> new to the Alpha, so don't know if the boot track should have to be manually
> written to the drive after install, if the installer is supposed to take
> care of that for you, etc.  I've tried various partitioning schemes, 
> etc and the aboot.conf changes acordingly so it would appear that 
> the installer is taking care of aboot but I can't be sure.
> 
> These boxes were previously TRU64 boxes (running fdisk /dev/sda 
> reports a BSD disklable, etc in case that helps, or hurts, in my case)
> 
> Any insight would be much appreciated!
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Scott
> 
> 

Dear Scott,

I have had the same thing happen with RedHat Linux installs on a PWS.  The
installer writes the aboot.conf file pointing to where the kernel isn't.  The
fix was easy, boot up in rescue mode, find out where the kernel really *was*
and edit the aboot.conf.

If your machine booted previously with the same partitioning scheme, it should
 be OK.  You can check on it using the rescue mode on your install CD.

You can just write a new line, then when you boot, type "boot -fl """ and you
will get a list of boot options, presumably including the new line you typed
into aboot.conf.  It worked for me, anyway ...

good luck!

jn