Hello
I tried several times to install Alpine Linux 3.13.5-x86 (using the
standard image) on a Pentium1 (586) system. The CD booted and the
installer ran through without reporting errors, but after rebooting,
all I get is the following output when the computer tries to boot from
the hard drive:
> PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT
During the installation process of Alpine Linux, I noticed that the
installer takes a long time (minutes) after it printed the line regarding
the generation of the initrd image. dmesg didn't report any issues with
the IDE drives and I can chroot into the installed system once I booted
again from the CD.
Just to be sure, I tried an installation on another hard drive, but I
still get the same message when trying to boot from the hard drive.
I also tried to install grub2 after chrooting into the system on the
hard drive, but I ended up in grub2 rescue mode and grub2 couldn't read
the content of any partition from any drive with the ls command.
The computer meets the minimum hardware requirements, as specified on the
installation page in the Alpine Linux wiki.
What else can I try to get a bootable Alpine Linux installation
on a hard drive of that computer?
Regards
Moritz
I was able to install FreeDOS on the hard drive and it booted
from there without problems, so it seems to be a software problem,
not a hardware problem.
On 5/9/21 12:27 PM, Moritz Strohm wrote:
> Hello>>> I tried several times to install Alpine Linux 3.13.5-x86 (using the> standard image) on a Pentium1 (586) system. The CD booted and the> installer ran through without reporting errors, but after rebooting,> all I get is the following output when the computer tries to boot from> the hard drive:>>> PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT
Is this a BIOS message? It seems that syslinux failed to install or
there is no booteable partition, are you booting legacy or uefi?
On 5/9/21 6:28 PM, Donoban wrote:
> On 5/9/21 12:27 PM, Moritz Strohm wrote:>> Hello>>>>>> I tried several times to install Alpine Linux 3.13.5-x86 (using the>> standard image) on a Pentium1 (586) system. The CD booted and the>> installer ran through without reporting errors, but after rebooting,>> all I get is the following output when the computer tries to boot from>> the hard drive:>>>>> PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT>>> Is this a BIOS message? It seems that syslinux failed to install or > there is no booteable partition, are you booting legacy or uefi?
With than system I suppose that it will be legacy. Check with fdisk that
your boot partition is bootable and try (install syslinux if needed first):
extlinux -i /mnt/boot
dd if=/usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda
> Check with fdisk that your boot partition is bootable and try> (install syslinux if needed first):> > extlinux -i /mnt/boot>> dd if=/usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda
The boot partition is marked as bootable according to fdisk.
I chrooted from the Alpine Linux CD to the Alpine Linux on the
hard drive and executed the two commands, but without success.
In the chroot environment, the first command was:
extlinux -i /boot
extlinux recognised that /dev/sda1 is the boot partition
(which should be correct) and reported no errors.
I also tried to install the alt-mbr.bin with dd, but the result
is the same. I checked that the MBR ends with the sequence
0x55 0xAA (using dd and xxd) before making attempts to reinstall
syslinux in it.
On 5/10/21 8:29 PM, Moritz Strohm wrote:
> The boot partition is marked as bootable according to fdisk. I > chrooted from the Alpine Linux CD to the Alpine Linux on the hard >
drive and executed the two commands, but without success. In the >
chroot environment, the first command was: > > extlinux -i /boot > >
extlinux recognised that /dev/sda1 is the boot partition (which > should
be correct) and reported no errors. > > I also tried to install the
alt-mbr.bin with dd, but the result is > the same. I checked that the
MBR ends with the sequence 0x55 0xAA > (using dd and xxd) before making
attempts to reinstall syslinux in > it.
For alt-mbr.bin did you set the boot partition?
'printf '\1' | cat altmbr.bin - | dd bs=440 count=1 iflag=fullblock
conv=notrunc of=/dev/sda'
For /dev/sda1 according to
https://wiki.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=Mbr
If you can boot apine from a usb, maybe you could configure it to boot
your hard disk install as a workaround until fixing this.
> If you can boot apine from a usb, maybe you could configure it to boot> your hard disk install as a workaround until fixing this.
No, that is not possible since the BIOS doesn't really support USB at all.
I tried to install Grub2 again, since Grub2 did at least boot, contrary to
syslinux/extlinux that didn't show any sign of booting at all (see above).
grub-mkconfig detected the vmlinuz-image and the ramdisk, so I assume it
generated a correct configuration file in /boot/grub/grub.cfg. Then, I called
grub-install like this:
grub-install --target=i386-pc --modules="boot ext2 elf vga vga_text msdospart configfile fat echo normal linux" /dev/sda
The installation reported no errors and after a reboot, I landed in the normal
grub mode, not the rescue mode, but grub2 still could not load the content of
the boot partition, which has an ext4 file system, set up by the alpine linux
installer. Event after manually loading the ext2 module in grub using
"insmod ext2", the content of the partitions cannot be read by grub.