From kragen@dnaco.net Wed Jul 8 23:50:15 1998 Date: Wed, 8 Jul 1998 23:50:14 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen To: clug-user@clug.org Subject: root/boot disks Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 376 Status: O X-Status: OK, so I bought an old PC, with (apparently) Win3.1 and MS-DOS on it. It's suspiciously clean. Nothing but DOS and Win on it. So I want to dump the 40MB disk to a gzipped file before installing more software on it. I build a root/boot disk (my first time doing so) with a limited set of stuff on it -- ash, minicom, sz, kernel of course, libc, ld-linux, all that good stuff... nothing huge, but enough to boot with. On gentle, my 5x86-133, it boots perfectly, and I get an ash prompt -- well, several, actually, one on each of several ttys. I can fire up minicom and talk to the modem. I stick the disk in Moxy, the old 386-16. Linux uncompresses, goes through its usual stretch-out-and-feel-the-hardware routine, uncompresses the ramdisk (which is 1600K, compressed to a little less than 600K), continues to boot, successfully runs rc.S and rc.M, and then doesn't do anything useful. None of the shells I've requested come up; agetty doesn't come up on tty5 like I want either. I can type characters on the screen, and get echoes. I can Alt-F2 and Alt-F1 between screens. Adding /bin/sh /dev/tty1 2>&1 near the end of rc.M gives me a shell prompt -- but if I type 'ls' at it, the same thing happens. All of these things work perfectly on gentle. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I might be doing wrong? Moxy can boot DOS and Win3.1 off the HDD just fine. (Or, at least, it could a few weeks ago.) If I try to access COM2 from Windows Terminal, it hangs, but COM1 is OK. Moxy's BIOS complains about some kind of DMA error during booting, which isn't surprising -- it appears to have four serial ports, two on the motherboard, one virtual serial port in the internal modem, and another DIN-9 sticking off the back of the VGA. Any ideas? Kragen