On Wed, Feb 14, 2001 at 07:48:18PM -0500, Matt Herzog wrote:
> Hi Sparcers. 
> 
> I am trying to boot miniroot from my Debian swap 
> partition and I am following the instructions
> to the letter from the:
> ftp://ftp.NetBSD.ORG/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.5/sparc/INSTALL.html
> page. The PROM insists that the file is not executable, so I
> ran a chmod +x in miniroot.fs before I did:
> dd if=miniroot.fs of=/dev/rsd0b bs=4k conv=sync
> This did not help. I got the same error message.

Do you have swap enabled when you write the minioroot ?
Then it's possible linux erase parts of the miniroot at shutdown.

Also make sure your swap partition is properly aligned on cylinders
boundaries.
> 
> Also the floppy install fails when I try to let
> the process mount the second floppy (/dev/rfd0a):
> fd0: timeout: state 16
> fd0: timeout: state 13
> fd0: timeout: state 13
> fd0: timeout: state 13
> fd0a: hard error reading fsbn 0
> fd0: controller status 13
> fd0: timeout: state 10
> fd0: timeout: state 13
> fd0: timeout: state 13
> fd0: timeout: state 13
> fd0: timeout: state 13
> fd0a: hard error reading fsbn 0 of 0-127
> fd0: controller status 13
> tar: End of archive volume 1 reached
> 
> Attention! tar archive volume change required.
> Ready for archive name or "." to quit tar.
> Archive name >
> 
> The sad thing is, the Debian floppy install worked
> flawlessly, and it uses two disks as well.

Maybe you have a bad floppy ?

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
--