Re: GRUB on DoC Millennium/2000 - Instructions

[Mark Meade <mark@lakeshoremicro.com>]

David Woodhouse wrote:
> Mark, that's excellent documentation -- thanks. Is it OK for me to put that
> on the web site?

Absolutely!  

> I have only one suggestion -- rather than using fdisk to create a single
> partition and then formatting that as ext2, we might as well just put the
> ext2 file system on /dev/nftla (i.e. the whole device), and use (dc0) in
> Grub instead.

Agreed.  I vaguely recall questions related to multiple partitions on the DoC 
-- my thought was writing it up as one big /dev/nftla1 partition may make it 
more obvious for those wanting to extend that to nftla2, 3, etc.

> BTW, did your 'factory marked' bad blocks in step 10 really match the ones
> from step 2? I'm still suspicious of nftl_format. 

Yes, it did.  The /LOG option in DFORMAT stuffs the bad blocks, in hex, into 
a text file.  They matched the bad blocks reported by nftl_format.

> It would be _really_ nice
> if we could use DFORMAT -- either a Linux port of DFORMAT to replace
> nftl_format and/or working out how to turn our Grub image into a .EXB file
> so it can be loaded directly by DFORMAT.

The latest DFORMAT has an option "/BDKF:<boot image file>" that supposedly 
will place a boot image file in the "binary (BDK) partition".  I tried this 
with grub_firmware, and I think it actually worked.  I'll try again, and if I 
can make this work reliably, I'll post the details.

A Linux DFORMAT that would load the grub firmware and create one ext2 
partition all in one shot (like the DOS version does with the M-Sys firmware 
and FAT12 partition) would be nice!

Regards,

Mark