From: basile@soleil.serma.cea.fr (Basile STARYNKEVITCH) Subject: Seeking|Making a bootable disk with UltraStrore34F kernel support? Date: Fri, 28 May 1993 14:09:12 GMT
Hello,
I will probably buy an UltraStore 34F (a VLB SCSI controller) for a 486DX33
Orchid (with 2 VLB slots) mothercard-based computer 16Mb RAM, a Maxtor SCSI harddisk
and an appropriate videocard.
I also have an old 20Mb (only twenty megabytes) IDE hard disk with a plain
AT bus IDE controller. I could use it for bootstrapping.
I will boot from the SLS 1.02 distribution (ftp-ed from packages/SLS)
I have downloaded the Image.UltraStor kernel image file and ultrastor.tar.z
gzipped tar archive (from packages/ALPHA/scsi) -and copied them on an
msdos formatted diskette.
In my understanding, the SLS 1.02 bootdisk (a1.3) does not support the
UltraStore 34F controller (strings a1.3|grep -i 14F doesn't show anything,
although the ultrastor source contains the string 14f at several places).
However, the SLS distribution claims to support SCSI.
I have several questions:
1) does the SLS bootdisk really support SCSI?
2) does the lack of UltraStore specific stuff in SLS just means that it
is not optimized for UltraStore (eg it will ask me my disk geometry,
and/or will not perform fast), but still can be used to load
appropriately Linux and use my Scsi UltraStore controller -- in which
cas i have only to install SLS as expected, and then recompile the
kernel for UltraStore stuff.
3) supposing the UltraStore 34F is not supported at all by the SLS 1.02
bootdisk, i will have to load a minimal system on my old 20Mb IDE and
make a bootable diskette from the Image.UltraStor file. I did read the
Lilo manual and Linux FAQ, but did not understood how to make it (eg
such a bootstrap). Eg how to make a bootable diskette with the
Image.UltraStor kernel?
4) a nightmare situation will be that my old 20Mb IDE drive is dead...
Is it possible to boot the SLS a1 bootdisk and make it reboot with
the Image.UltraStor kernel on another msdos disk?
Thanks for any help