Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 33261
SRM boot - could not find valid boot block
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:32:23 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98) All variants of partitioning (automatic, disk druid as well as fdisk)and installation finish perfectly without any warning. however, booting linux from the SRM prompt is impossible printing the message "could not find valid boot block". Reason (thanks to mr. ernstl, redhat europe hotline): the disk(s) used had a pre-configured dos-labelled partition table, while SRM boot requires a BSD disk label. but a person doing the installation cannot find this out, because the installation completes successfully, and Installation Guide 3.21 about SRM tells nothing about this error message. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.install on a dos-labelled disk using any partitioning variant 2.SRM>>> boot 3. Actual Results: get the SRM error message "could not find valid boot block" Expected Results: linux should just boot as suggested in the installation guide. - as its known that SRM requires a BSD disk label to boot, the installer should at least give a warning. - Installation Guide 3.21 about SRM boot should, include a hint that this error message suggests the partitioning to be checked weather using a BSD label.
There are two methods of bootstrapping the Alpha One is SRM and as you've seen has the drawback that it expects to see a BSD disk label. The OTHER method is via AlphaBIOS and that DOES use an MSDOS label and not a BSD disk label. So we're caught in a rock and a hard place. It's not feasible for the installer to determine which bootloading mechanism it's using (AlphaBIOS - MSDOS, SRM - BSDlabel) If the disk is fresh and utterly unformatted it will by default opt for the BSDlabel system, if it detects a MSDOS label it will plumb for the MSDOS option based on 'it was perviously formatted as XXXX' To get around this you can always use the fdisk method to change the label type to BSD. Alternatively you can zero out the first track with nulls eg dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda count=1 bs=60000 Possibly, this needs better explained in the documentation. Cheers Phil =--=
It's actually very simple to tell...if we've come from ALphaBIOS/MILO then the system serial number in /proc/cpuinfo will be MILO-0000 for example from my XL300: [rdp@talisman rdp]$ more /proc/cpuinfo cpu : Alpha cpu model : EV5 cpu variation : 0 cpu revision : 0 cpu serial number : Linux_is_Great! system type : Alcor system variation : Bret system revision : 0 system serial number : MILO-0000 cycle frequency [Hz] : 299989008 timer frequency [Hz] : 1024.00 page size [bytes] : 8192 phys. address bits : 40 max. addr. space # : 127 BogoMIPS : 295.69 kernel unaligned acc : 8 (pc=fffffc00003a019c,va=11ffffc6a) user unaligned acc : 0 (pc=0,va=0) platform string : N/A cpus detected : 0 If you boot from SRM then the field is blank.
Ah ha,.. ok I'll pass that off to the installer team to see if they can tap into that and make sensible adjustments cheers Phil =--=
Unfortunately Milo isn't officially supported 8/
sorry, we can't fix MILO right now.