I am having difficulties in installing correctly the SuSE distribution.
In particular, I can't utilize a DOS partition to boot the machine
and I can't use kdm.
The details of the problem:
- The machine is an IBM Intellistation with 2 ITANIUM processors at 800MHz
and 2 16GByte SCSI disks attached to a 160MHz Adaptec controller.
- OS is SuSE Linux ia64 7.2.
- The system was installed on a 6GByte ext2 partition /dev/sda1 and uses
a 2 GByte swap on the same disk (/dev/sda2). Both partitions were
created inside YAST2 manually.
- When the installation program rebooted the machine the first time,
the reboot failed. (This is fine since we had not created any DOS
partition.) Therefore we booted again from CD1 (`boot an installed system')
and finished the installation.
- At this point the first real problem occurred.
The installation program rebooted again but the boot process freezed after
starting kdm. The monitor switched to powersave mode and Ctrl-Alt-Del
was disabled. (Jan-Christoph Westermann reported a similar problem
on January 31st in this list, I believe.)
- We renamed /etc/init.d/xdm and rebooted (using CD1). The boot succeeded.
We could started X as root from terminal by startx and play
with the configuration manager sax2.
- Now the really unexpected part. We created a partition with
label "FAT16" and formatted it with
mkdosfs -v -F 16 /dev/sda3.
- We copied /boot/elilo.efi and /boot/vmlinuz to the DOS partition.
- Rebooted. EFI could not see the DOS partition. However, the physical
device is there, in the output of the map command.
(EFI recognized only fs0:, the boot partition made visible by
the installation cd.) We also checked later that the partition was
readable.
- We tried many times with different partition labels (does EFI
check it?). No change. We also tried creating the DOS partition
on /dev/sdb1. (But the EFI primer from Intel's site does not mention
EFI preferences concerning drives or even
partition numbers, if I understand it correctly.) Same effect.
I would really appreciate any hint on how to solve these problems.
Although I have some experience with Linux on IA-32 machines,
IA-64 is entirely new to me.
Thanks a lot.
Stefano
--
Stefano Lodi, PhD
Researcher
Dept. of Electronics, C.S. and Systems & Faculty of Statistical Sciences
University of Bologna, ITALY