Hi
I've spend some more time thinking about how the multi stage boot process works on this device. I think it goes as follows but feel free to comment / tell me where I'm going wrong.
I've not been able to get an interactive u-boot session going which leaves the wloader program as the best option to get Debian working on the device. The three options are USB, recovery and HD.
USB: create a rootfs on a FAT32 formatted USB disk with label DELLWYSE and play around with the kernel parameters in wloader to try to get it to work.
recovery: copy uImage and uInitrd from bohdi's rootfs to /dev/sda2 (which seems to be the recovery partition) and set the rootfs ext3 USB disk as kernel parameter root=/dev/sdb1
HD: I've tried a few things but it looks as if it keeps booting the old kernel but with the new /rootfs resulting in a kernel panic and kernel too old message.
I'll start with the recovery option for now since I've already got the ext3 usb stick. Feel free to comment if any of my assumptions of the boot sequence are wrong or if you have a better idea of how to get Debian running.
Thanks,
Koen
I've spend some more time thinking about how the multi stage boot process works on this device. I think it goes as follows but feel free to comment / tell me where I'm going wrong.
- u-boot is the first bootloader but can not be accessed through serial unfortunately.
- u-boot loads a minimal linux system which runs the wloader program. This can be seen as the 2nd bootloader. If no input is given it will use the default configuration however if interrupted it's configuration can be changed and saved. Once that has been done it will use this configuration to load the actual linux system. This is similar to how kexecboot https://www.openhub.net/p/kexecboot or petitboot http://ftp.cvut.cz/kernel/people/geoff/petitboot/petitboot.html work.
- The minimal linux system hands over control to the final / actual operating system. For the normal / default procedure this is Ubuntu 10 on the internal mermory. However there are options such as recovery or USB. When USB is selected it allows you to run the Dell firmware upgrade / extraction tool.
I've not been able to get an interactive u-boot session going which leaves the wloader program as the best option to get Debian working on the device. The three options are USB, recovery and HD.
USB: create a rootfs on a FAT32 formatted USB disk with label DELLWYSE and play around with the kernel parameters in wloader to try to get it to work.
recovery: copy uImage and uInitrd from bohdi's rootfs to /dev/sda2 (which seems to be the recovery partition) and set the rootfs ext3 USB disk as kernel parameter root=/dev/sdb1
HD: I've tried a few things but it looks as if it keeps booting the old kernel but with the new /rootfs resulting in a kernel panic and kernel too old message.
I'll start with the recovery option for now since I've already got the ext3 usb stick. Feel free to comment if any of my assumptions of the boot sequence are wrong or if you have a better idea of how to get Debian running.
Thanks,
Koen