Hi all, I am attempting to install Debian Linux on a Sparc Ultra5. For my own convenience I'm using netboot over TFTP images to install this machine, however I've been consistently running into problems partitioning the disks I have available. The issue is rather simple, whenever I attempt to partition any disk I use with this machine (I've used disks with sizes between 5GB and 120GB - basically my entire stock of IDE drives) it fails with an undescribed error after writing the partition table. I initially started installing with Lenny, the oldest version I had available as I had trouble installing Squeeze, (TFTPBoot images after Lenny lack a driver for this particular chipset) so the symptoms described below are for that particular version of Debian. I took the "unknown" error to mean that there was some issue with the default partitioner in Debian-installer (a modified parted, if I'm reading the code correctly) so, after learning how Debian-installer worked, downloaded the official udeb fdisk and attempted to partition using that tool, and discovered that partition tables would not stay written. Writing a SUN or MSDOS partition table would apparently write without errors, but when I re-ran the tool, it complained that there was no partition table on the disk. I then tried the same experiment with parted and discovered that only a mac partition table would stay written on the disk. Over a year later, I discovered that mac partition tables are only a couple of bytes, so I guessed that the error here was that the IDE controller was too old to write to disks above 8.4GB (the old size limit for PCs from the "olden" days) so I obtained a 5.1GB disk, and today attempted installation again with the same results. The most annoying thing about this is that I know that one of the disks in my possession *did* work with this computer, however I removed it as I needed it for another project and have since misplaced it. Debian Lenny uses a Debian enhanced version of the 2.6.26 kernel and the IDE chipset is a CMD64x chip, (Config option: CONFIG_BLK_DEV_CMD64X) I'm using generic IDE disks that work fine on ordinary PCs or through USB => IDE boxes. Can anyone help? Please note that the install environment boots fine, and once it's booted, the system works fine, from what I can tell, within the install environment. As for the physical hardware, I'm using a known-working 80 pin IDE cable, setting the disk to master and placing it as the last drive on the cable. Has anyone seen this happen before and how was it fixed? Is there something specific that an Ultra5 looks for in a hdd? Thanks, -- Julian Calaby Email: julian.calaby@xxxxxxxxx Profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/julian.calaby/ .Plan: http://sites.google.com/site/juliancalaby/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe sparclinux" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
