next up previous contents index
Next: E.10 Acknowledgements Up: E Alpha Miniloader Howto Previous: E.8 Restrictions

E.9 Problem Solving

Here are some common problems that people have seen, together with the solutions.

Reading MS-DOS floppies from the Evaluation Board Debug Monitor. Several people reported having problems reading files from the floppy disk using the Evaluation Board Debug Monitor supplied with Digital Alpha Evaluation Boards such as the AlphaPC64. Usually, the Debug Monitor can load the first few sectors all right, but then goes into an endless loop complaining about "bad sectors." Apparently, there is an incompatibility between the DOS file system as expected by the Debug Monitor and the Linux implementation of DOSFS. To make the long story short: if you run into this problem, try using DOS to write the floppy disk. For example, if loading the file milo.cab doesn't work, use a DOS machine, insert the floppy and then do:

     copy a:milo.cab c:
     copy c:milo.cab a:
     del c:milo.cab

Then try booting from that floppy again. This normally solves the problem.

Milo displays a long sequence of O and does not accept input. This usually happens when Milo was built to use COM1 as a secondary console device. In such a case, Milo echo output to COM1 and accepts input from there also. This is great for debugging but not so great if you have a device other than a terminal connected. If this happens, disconnect the device or power it down until the Linux kernel has booted. Once Linux is up and running, everything will work as expected.



Red Hat Software