Using Ignite-UX to make bootable Magneto-Optical disks

[Michael D'Aulerio]

I tried to post this before but somehow it got lost. I'm using Ignite-UX on HP-UX 10.20 to create a boot image and then using the 'dd' command to copy it to an MO disk. I've had success with a variety of disks (capacities of 4.1 and 5.2 GByte) The disks had sector densities of 1Kbyte and 2Kbyte/sector. I copied the same image to a 9.1GB disk with 4Kbyte sector density and was unable to boot from the disk. I believe the key is the sector density. I found one 9.1GB disk with 1Kbyte/sector and was able to copy the image to it and boot from it. I've found one patch which allows me to create file systems on the 4K disks but nothing that talks about bootable images. Does anyone out there use MO disks on HP-UX systems? Has anyone tried to boot from MO disk on an HP-UX 10.20 system? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

From what I understood a bootable CD, Tape etc. needs to at least start with bs=512 .
I'd ask You to give it a try.

[Michael D'Aulerio]

Thanks for the response. I am able to create bootable disks with bs=512, bs=1K and bs=2K. The problem is that the media that we have has a block density of 4K. It won't allow me to create a disk at a lower density. I'm not sure Ignite-UX works with the 4K block size.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

Ouch, oh. I hadn't got that right, sorry.

If the block size of the MO is 4K, there won't be *any* help, from as far as I understand. At least the ISL and all those things that happen to load a kernel need 512 byte blocks. I can't really explain why, I just learned it the bad way.

Sorry.

[Tore_1]

I don't know if this helps at all, but you are aware of make_medialif command?

[Michael D'Aulerio]

Tore, yes I use the make_medialif command to create my LIF file. I use make_sys_image to create a tar bundle on a logical volume, copy the volume to a file using 'dd' and then use 'instl_combine' to create the bootable image. I am able to copy this image to the MO disk. No problem. The problem comes when I try to boot the MO disk on my system. If I create the image on an MO disk with a 1K or 2K sector size, it boots successfully. When I copy the same image to the MO with 4K sector size, the disk will not boot. I didn't find anything in any of the Ignite-UX man pages that discussed sector size.

[curt larson_1]

don't know how much this partains to your situation, but from the ignite faq. When you create a bootable cd the lif files are written with a 2k block size.