[Soekris] net4801 and hard drives

[William Estrada]

Wayne,

  I have installed Redhat and Fedora twice on my 4801.  It is a lengthy process
due to the under powered 4801 (266mhz).  

  There are many different processes you can use.  I found that the PXE boot of the
install disk worked the best.  The last install took three hours.  I found that 
doing a simple install without all of the add ons works best.  You can then use 'yum'
to upgrade your system at a later date.  The setup for this can be found at:

  http://64.124.13.3/hacks/network_boot.html

  It is not complete but will give you a start.  I can help you if you wish.

  At this point, it appears you have a usable install from the laptop.  You
just need to get grub steup the right way.  Post or Email your grub.conf.

  Have you tried to boot from your laptop?  This will tell you if the install
worked.

  What does your 4801 hardware look like?  Flash primary/second, etc.  You could
load a working image on the flash to help with debugging.  I have used Pebble, DSL
and alike.  Install grub on the flash disk.  Make sure you use the serial console
setup.  This may help:

  http://64.124.13.3/hacks/USB_Boot_using_GRUB.html

  Although you will not boot from the USB port, you can see who to set up grub.
Make the flash disk primary and the start testing.  You can set the hard drive to
be the first boot device, with the flash disk as a secondary (back up) device.
Remember to turn off hard ware flow control on you console program (minicom, etc).

  Hope some of this will help?

-- 
  Thanks for your time.

William Estrada

Email      : MrUmunhum at popdial dot com
Resume     : www.Mt-Umunhum-Wireless.net/resume/william_estrada.html
HTTP       : www.Mt-Umunhum-Wireless.net

> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2006 16:33:25 -0600
> From: Wayne Walker <wwalker at bybent.com>
> Subject: [Soekris] net4801 and hard drives
> To: soekris-tech at lists.soekris.com
> Message-ID: <20061121223325.GA20379 at bybent.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been trying without success to load linux on a hard drive on the
> net4801.
> 
> I've tried two methods:
> 
> 1. use PXE boot to run the installation of CentOS4.4 over the network
> 
> 2. Installing it on the hard drive via a notebook computer with a
> Pentium class processor, then disabling the vga tty's and enabling the
> serial one (in inittab and in grub).
> 
> the PXE boot boots, loads the initrd and spews messages to the screen,
> but then the kernel fails to load.
> 
> The installation on the notebook works mostly, but when grub boots, ti
> says loading stage 1.5, then blanks the serial terminal and does nothing
> else...
> 
> Has anyone gotten a modern linux installed on the net4801 on a hard
> drive?
> 
> -- Wayne Walker