Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Still trying to get Syllable installed on EeePC 901

Made a number of attempts (QEmu route) to get a bootable image onto /dev/sdb7 on the EeePC 901. However, all were failures.
In general, in trying to boot to Syllable through my multiboot Grub menu (chainloading to Syllable) I got an Error 15 and nothing more.
I wasn't sure if the problem was that Syllable must be installed on a primary partition like windows or FreeBSD. So, I did a few tests on the Dell.
What I found here was that Syllable installs, and boots perfectly from, either a primary (/dev/sda1) or a logical partition (/dev/sda10). Note that in the bootloader configuration during the install, the grub bootloader MUST go to the partition and NO changes whatsoever are required to the configuration of menu.lst within Syllable.
The grub menu on the computer should contain the usual chainloader section for Syllable where the rootnoverify line contains the Grub designation {(hd0,6) for /dev/sda7} for the syllable partition -- nothing out of the ordinary here.
Now there is one big difference between what I'm trying to do and what was described by M Saunders. This is that he imaged the 'whole' disk rather than just a partition as I am doing.
However, I fail to see how this is different from what I do in Haiku/Senryu where an image is downloaded, unzipped and then dd'ed to a partition, not a whole disk. And, this works every time without a problem but only after I've made the partition bootable.
Could that be the problem?
Today also, I tried to make a bootable Syllable LiveUSB using Unetbootin. The process went without problems but when I tried to boot to this usb-key I got the error:

Loading /system/kernel.so
Invalid or corrupt image

So, no luck there either.
In addition, I moved to the development version of Syllable (0.6.6) on the advice of guys in the forum but this didn't seem to make any difference whatsoever.
At this stage, there is no immediate light at the end of the tunnel other than buying a usb-CDROM for my EeePC to allow me to install Syllable from a CD.

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