Hey all,

Up until last night I had a nice working ext3 partition with a properly bootable FC5 on it.

I've also got this partition visible from the MOS side using the ext2FileSystem, which doesn't do everything yet, but is very nice.

Last night, I tried to label the FC5 partition in order to get a proper name to show up on my ext2 mounted drive under MOS, instead of A881-231B.

And that f*cked things up. I can still run yaboot, but when I tell it to boot hd0:4,/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-1.2187_FC5, instead of hd0:4, the 'h' is still there, and the rest becomes crap.

Also, it now always says that my vmlinuz-2.6.17-1.2187_FC5 and also my original vmlinuz-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 file are 'not legal ELF files'.

I can't boot my FC5 any more. How can I fix this?

Hoping for some good hints,

wlamee

Try getting those kernel versions from the Fedora package repository. I think there is a version of RPM that can unpack them on http://amiga.sf.net so this is a start.

Unpack it to your MorphOS partition, boot from there, and put "s" on the end of the boot argument. This will bring it into read-only single-user mode, where you can fsck the partition.

Once you've done that, copy the kernels to the ext3 partition, UNDER LINUX, since it will be safe to do so there.

Hopefully proceeding from that point is self-explanatory.

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Matt Sealey

Tried the p7zip-4.42.lha (which I assume is the one you meant from http://amiga.sf.net), but it didn't want to decode the kernel RPMs from fedora.redhat.com .

I also tried a diff between the 'non-legal' vmlinuz file on my FC5 partition and the one on the first FC5 CD (/ppc/ppc32/vmlinuz), using the MOS ext2/3fs and GNU diff from Aminet. They were identical.

And now I have done two subsequent complete reinstalls of FC5 from CD, with reformatting the partitions, and still it doesn't boot because yaboot still says my vmlinuz files are bad ELFs.

To be sure, I also rechecked the integrity of the CDs I'm installing from, they're still 100% good.

Anycody else had this 'illegal ELF' problem? Could it have someting to do with Mask/MaxTransfer values of the partition may be?

No.. maybe I said the wrong site. There *is* an RPM tool for Amiga/MorphOS though, somewhere. If not, there is a cute script which will do it using 'cpio' somewhere too. Someone else will have to point you at it, I googled and found absolutely zip.. if you'll pardon the term
Could be a symptom of some kind of disk problem.. how old is it? It may work some and not work some depending on the configuration of moon, stars and alien activity on Zeta Reticuli 7.
In copying them to the disk they may be becoming corrupted. Have you done a disk check to see if all those blocks can really be read?
So some questions; what kind of disk is it, where is it attached, how old is it, and are you sure it is actually working properly - if it's IDE, with an 80-core cable?

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Matt Sealey

Ok, thanks for your answer, but I took the hard way in the mean time. I now have FC5 installed on a new partition on a SCSI disk, that works fine now (my whole disk reorganization is mostly done now).

In order to miss out on partition size probs (~100GB being a safe max partition size for all things), I roughly made 5 100GB partitions on that disk, 4 of them with PFS3, and the last became 95GB ext3 and 5GB swap. And two of the PFS3 partitions are 95% full, hadn't had an error there yet.

But why it went wrong, I still don't know. I'll answer your questions, and tell you my latests findings - maybe they will be of use to someone.

Before I installed it on a brand new UW-SCSI disk (Maxtor Atlas 15K II, 147GB), I had it installed on a brand new Hitachi Deskstar 7k500 (500GB), with 80-core cabling. I also recently upped the PSU to a 400W version. And for 'brand new' I mean one or two weeks.

And as you suggested the files 'may become corrupted in copying them to the disk', that's sort of excluded if my GNU diff says it's identical to the file on the CD, right?

As far as being sure it works properly, first time 'round I could install all of FC5 on the 7K500 IDE disk, do some browsing, and do a full yum update. After that came the 'illegal ELF' problem. After that, I did a complete reinstall, including reformatting the ext3 and swap partitions I used earlier. 'illegal ELF' problem still there.

Currently, I'm running FC5 (with a full yum update from 2 hours ago) off the Atlas UW-SCSI disk. So far so good. I did have some arsing about with the 'firstboot' program, that seems to get skipped as it should now, after some interactive booting.

But thanks for your help, mate.

BTW, I put Marek Szyprowski's ext2filesystem (v0.25 now) on the SCSI drive, and now I have the ext3 FC5 partition mounted when I boot MOS. Very nice.

Is this a Symbios Logic SCSI card? There could be a few small problems in firmware... or MorphOS.. if it is not precisely the right kind of chipset. They are all roughly compatible within a range, but the newer ones have been known to be a bit flakey for some reason.

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Matt Sealey

Yes, it's a Symbios card, but the SCSI part seems to work fine atm. FWIW, this card has a 53C895 on it, and before that I used another card with a 53C875E on it, which also seemed to work fine.

On the MOS beta ML I saw some emails that the 53C895 should be good on the Peg2. I'm happy with it, and am going to test my scanners next (Epson flatbed and Canon negative scanner). Do you have any more comments on the Symbios (or other) SCSI cards?

And FC6 was released just now, so I think I'll try and back up my SCSI FC5 partition to the IDE partition and have a go at FC6. I guess I should put some up-to-date info on my web site, http://www.wouterlamee.nl