[parisc-linux] Palo: how-to reinstall

[parisc-linux] Palo: how-to reinstall

[SOETE Joël]

Dear Matt,

I have to reinstall my root fs after some fatal mistakes. And I discover a
may25-3-wide raw and try it.

Just a problem when it try to reinstall palo (a had also this problem
before).
My system disk was already made bootable with palo and I do not want
re-format the all disk because of some other fs containing some packages and
test I do not want to loose.

Is there any tips to re-install palo on a working disk (writing 512 null
char at the beginning of the disk with dd?)?

Thanks in advance for advises,

	Joel


**********************************************************************
This e-mail and any attachments to it may contain confidential information which is strictly intended for the use of the authorised recipient.  If you have received this e-mail in error, please delete it and notify the sender by replying to this e-mail.
Thank you for your co-operation.
**********************************************************************

Re: [parisc-linux] Palo: how-to reinstall

[Paul Bame]

> Dear Matt,
> 
> I have to reinstall my root fs after some fatal mistakes. And I discover a
> may25-3-wide raw and try it.
> 
> Just a problem when it try to reinstall palo (a had also this problem
> before).
> My system disk was already made bootable with palo and I do not want
> re-format the all disk because of some other fs containing some packages and
> test I do not want to loose.
> 
> Is there any tips to re-install palo on a working disk (writing 512 null
> char at the beginning of the disk with dd?)?

The palo Debian package does nothing to your disk when it is installed.  This
will eventually change I think but not soon.

Palo does not modify the disk partition table, only the contents of the F0
partition and some parameters needed by the HP boot ROM.

I do not understand your problem -- can you give more details?

	-Paul Bame

Re: [parisc-linux] Palo: how-to reinstall

[bame]

There are a couple of possible problems.

If your disk is bigger than 2Gb you will need at least palo-0.89 to
initialize it on a 32-bit box.  palo-0.90 is currently in the debian
archive and is a good choice.

The palo -U (or --update-partitioned) is not well tested and may not work
at all.

The best way to use and re-install palo is to put the right commands
in /etc/palo.conf (be sure to read how to do this properly).  Then you
can simply re-run 'palo' at any time safely.  You can also re-run
the command you used to install palo the first time.

> That is why at the beginning the only solution I found was to reformat the
> disk (fdisk) and reinstall from scratch.
> And I forgot that I have to report this problem and just keep in mind
> (abusively) that to reinstall command line (or other parameter) I have to
> reformat all my disk.

I hope you'll have better luck with palo-0.90!

Re: [parisc-linux] Palo: how-to reinstall

[bame]

I must apologize we found a defect in palo-0.90 which prevents booting
on certain partition configurations.  palo-0.91 is just uploaded to
debian and should be available tomorrow.  I'll also upload to
puffin.external.hp.com in the regular place.  You can also use palo-0.88
if your disk is not more than 2Gb

	-P

Re: [parisc-linux] Palo: how-to reinstall

[bame]

Even with the bad palo you can boot.

Ask your boot rom to boot interactively.  On recent boxes it's
something like this:
	boot
	y

On 712:
	boot pri ipl

Once palo is interactive, edit #0 to be:

	0/vmlinux

this boots from the recovery kernel stored in the F0 partition.

	-P