SliTaz Forum

maba001

Member

Registered: 2019-08-29

Posts: 5

Booting to Slitaz from Floppy

Hello all,

I am currently rescuing an old EISA PC (HP Vectra 486/33U) with HPLAN 27245 and an Adaptec SCSI Adapter. It contains 2 HDDs - one 245 MB IDE drive and one 1 GB SCSI drive plus the 1.44 MB (3.5 inch) and the 1.2 MB (5.25 inch) floppies.

Prozessor: Intel 486 DX - 33 MHz (as the machine name suggests)

RAM: 40 MByte

To dump the existing content (which is still working), I want to boot a live Linux system that can do a "dd" of the harddisk over the network (via ssh).

Goal is to transform the old setup into a Disk-Image that can be used on a modern machine under Qemu.

--------

I created Slitaz boot floppies from multiple versions - none worked successfully and I would appreciate any hints:

Slitaz2 base: Floppy loads and shows kernel line, when pressing ENTER it starts issuing the register names of the processor plus some RAM addresses. This goes on forever.

I tried changing some of the kernel parameters with no success.

Slitaz3 base: same as Slitaz2

Slitaz4 base: no kernel message. It starts printing "-" signs forever.

From that I switched to Tiny (also with multiple versions) but still no success.

Any ideas??

THANKS MUCH for any help.

bellard

Administrator

Registered: 2011-03-28

Posts: 657

Re: Booting to Slitaz from Floppy

Hello,

I've put the missing drivers in Tiny Slitaz  http://hg.slitaz.org/wok-tiny/rev/df0a7ccded6c

and built this floppy image http://mirror1.slitaz.org/pxe/tiny/vectra486 with hplan, aha1740, ide, floppy, dropbear, rsync and vfat support, assuming that your ethernet I/O base is 0x300 and the SCSI card is an EISA / Adaptec 1740.

Can you test it ?

> Slitaz4 base: no kernel message. It starts printing "-" signs forever.

The "-" sign means I/O error. Retry forever until ok.

maba001

Member

Registered: 2019-08-29

Posts: 5

Re: Booting to Slitaz from Floppy

I have downloaded it and will test it now. So I will be away from my normal machine for some time. I will keep you posted on the success. The assumptions are correct by the way.

Test performed: no success ... running dashes

I have tested it with 3 different floppies and 2 of them worked up to the display of the kernel version during the earlier test.

bellard

Administrator

Registered: 2011-03-28

Posts: 657

Re: Booting to Slitaz from Floppy

The floppy was buggy : it didn't load the scsi drivers

The fix : http://hg.slitaz.org/wok-tiny/rev/881167180f57

I have updated  http://mirror1.slitaz.org/pxe/tiny/vectra486 and include a media checker...

It can be tested with the Web Boot (IPXE) All SliTaz versions --> Tiny SliTaz ...

maba001

Member

Registered: 2019-08-29

Posts: 5

Re: Booting to Slitaz from Floppy

Hello again,

memory check - PASS

media check - PASS

Boot message displayed .. after that "running dashes"

[attachment=47756,2830]  [attachment=47756,2831]  [attachment=47756,2832]

bellard

Administrator

Registered: 2011-03-28

Posts: 657

Re: Booting to Slitaz from Floppy

The 'Check media' gives the trick: it read the floppy sector by sector.

'Tiny SliTaz' and 'Check memory' read the floppy track by track.

I have patched http://mirror1.slitaz.org/pxe/tiny/vectra486 and now both will read sector by sector.

It's far slower but should work now.

maba001

Member

Registered: 2019-08-29

Posts: 5

Re: Booting to Slitaz from Floppy

Hello Bellard,

this goes together with which remaining disk set ?

Best regards

Maba

maba001

Member

Registered: 2019-08-29

Posts: 5

Re: Booting to Slitaz from Floppy

The test in Virtualbox worked just fine !!!

I will try tomorrow on the real hardware. I checked and found that there is nothing needed besides that 1 disk!

Awesome. Thanks a lot Bellard.