Subject: help with initial install on MobilePro 770
To: None <port-hpcmips@netbsd.org>
From: None <russe@electriclichen.com>
List: port-hpcmips
Date: 10/09/2001 09:10:14
I spent a couple of hours this weekend trying to install
netbsd-hpcmips on my MobilePro 770.  I've got a 256M CF card that I
plan to use for the installation, and I have a Thinkpad running NetBSD
1.5.1, along with a PCMCIA CF adapter, so I can muck around with the
CF card on my laptop.

Before getting into details, any suggestions about what would be the
best strategy for getting NetBSD installed on the MobilePro, given
this hardware?

I tried setting up the CF card manually, but it didn't work right
(more details below), so I'm wondering whether I should do a sysinst
install, but this actually seemed like more work, given that I don't
have an easy way to access the sets from the MobilePro (can I copy the
sets to a CF partition, and so a sysinst install from there?).

I read the user FAQ and INSTALL files carefully before getting
started, and I decided to try to set up the CF card manually,
according to the instructions in the user FAQ.

I ran fdisk on the CF device, which showed up as wd1, and created a
240M NetBSD partition, and a 5M windows partition.  This seemed to
work OK.  

Then I tried to create a disklabel for wd1.  I managed this somehow,
but the output from the disklabel command didn't look quite right when
compared with the output in the docs (I can get the exact output when
I'm at home tonight).

I mounted the CF msdos partition to /msdos2, and the CF netbsd
partition to /mnt as described in the user FAQ, installed pbsdboot.exe
in /msdos2, put the netbsd kernel there, too, for good measure, then
untarred all the sets and put the kernel in /mnt, also as described.  

This all seemed to work fine, but when I pop the CF into the
MobilePro, I get a Windows error popup that says "pbsdboot is not a
valid WindowsCE application" or something like that.  Anyone have
ideas what I've done wrong?  I wonder if it's something as simple as
downloading pbsdboot.exe in text mode, instead of binary mode,
although I don't think that I made this particular mistake.

I suspect that I've mucked up the disklabel on the CF card.  Windows
reports the size of the CF card incorrectly, but it can see the files
I've put onto the msdos CF partition.  Very strange.

-russ


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