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baslinux - [BL] IBM-with-onboard-RAM boot problems, ramdisk and loop

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  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [BL] IBM-with-onboard-RAM boot problems, ramdisk and loop
  • Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2006 05:29:00 +0000 (UTC)

On Tue, 28 Nov 2006, sindi keesan wrote:

So he can boot BL2 ramdisk from hard disk or from USB memory stick, after
booting with DOS USB drivers in config.sys. Can BL3 loop be booted from a
USB memory stick partition?

BL2 ramdisk and BL3 loop with loadlin both work from a USB memory stick, but, at least on our IBM computer with 1MB onboard-video-RAM which can't be freed up, there are certain constraints.

1. If booting with kernel 2.2 and more than 64MB RAM, set mem=127M when you put in 128M, because 1M is retained by the onboard video even when you disable the onboard video. Otherwise it gets a kernel panic and attempts to access beyond end of device (memory). Kernel 2.4.31 ignores the mem= on the loadlin line, and detects memory correctly (127MB).

2. You must boot BL2 ramdisk and BL3 loop without himem.sys on this computer. Ext2 BL boots despite himem.sys. Win98 cannot be made to boot without himem.sys from hard drive. We booted from floppy disk with standalone DOS 7.1. Himem.sys somehow interferes with onboard RAM or something. It also prevents Xvesa from working, but that may be due to the ATI video card. Another computer (emachine) with onboard ATI video also would not run Xvesa with himem.sys loaded in DOS first. Some day I will try another video card in this computer with himem.sys and Xvesa. We use a lilo boot disk now instead, or a non-Xvesa server.

3. We can boot both of these from the USB stick after booting with DOS usb drivers in config.sys, except for the standard BL2 and BL3 kernels (zimage), which get a 'kernel panic, Unable to mount root fs on 00:00'.
Steven's zimage.p1 for both BL2 and BL3 (kernels 2.2.16 and 2.2.26), and my pentium-i 2.4.31 kernel, all boot properly. This is for both hard drive and USB stick boot.

So if you have trouble booting ramdisk BL2 and/or loop BL3, try specifying mem= with 1M less than actual or use kernel 2.4, boot without himem.sys (hit F5 during boot for regular DOS, or if you have Win98 boot from a floppy disk instead), and use a P1 kernel.

Did pre-P1 computers have onboard video that borrows from system RAM? I have seen onboard video chips with their own RAM in 486s. The type of board that borrows system RAM seems unsuited for BL.

The non-USB-storage P1 kernels also booted from the USB storage device.
The DOS drivers apparently are all you need. But you can't then access other USB storage devices on the host computer.

We plan to take our linux-on-a-stick to use on other computers, along with the DOS USB boot floppy disk. A USB camera would also work, and I had been accessing linux on it by booting with linux USB boot disk, mounting the file system in a loop (no initrd.gz, just the image file) and chrooting to it. I posted a 2.4.31 setup for that which includes zgv and is 5 or 8MB.

Are there computers which will boot directly from USB memory stick in
cases where the manufacturer was so cheap that there is no floppy drive?

Sindi




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