Making a boot CD - ohhhh, I'm close!

[Alan McKay]

Hi Folks,

I'm trying to make a bootable install CD for PPC.   We've already done
this for i386 and what we did was blow open the FC6 CD1, remove what
we don't need, add what we do need, then glue it all back together
with a magical incantation of "mkisofs".  Works great!  (We're
installing FC6 and our stuff goes on top of it)

PPC has been a really different beast as I'm sure you all know.
We're using the same approach by blowing open the FC6 CD1 but are
having trouble with the magic incantation.   I came upon this list via
google (only after some  2 or 3 hours of googling and reading,
unfortunately), and found this thread from March of this year
concerning this exact topic :

http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/fedora-ppc/2007-March/000971.html

I  thought I was home free, but when I try what pnasrat suggests, I
get this error :

Uh oh, I cant find the boot image "./yaboot"!

I tried with both full and relative paths to the yaboot file.  At
first I was just pointing to the original file as it exists on the
blown-open FC6 CD1 in my filesystem. (./fc6/ppc/chrp/yaboot).  Then I
tried copying it out of there and putting it elsewhere.

Here is my current magic incantation.   Note that "fc6" is the
directory in my current working directory which contains the contents
of FC6 CD1 PPC.

mkisofs -r -J -T -V "@SOMELABLE" -A "Created on `date`"  -p
"somename"
-publisher "somename" -x "lost+found" -input-charset iso8859-1 -U
-chrp-boot -l -prep-boot ./yaboot -part-hfs -hfs-bless `pwd`/fc6/ppc
-map fc6/ppc/mapping -magic fc6/ppc/magic -no-desktop -allow-multidot
-o somefile.iso fc6

Ooooohhhhh, I'm so close!   Help me Obi-wan Kenobi.   You're my only hope!

-- 
"Aikido has but one principle - the universal reality of life"
               - Mitsugi Saotome

[Jesse Keating]

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:14:55 -0400
"Alan McKay" <alan.mckay(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

>  Ooooohhhhh, I'm so close!   Help me Obi-wan Kenobi.   You're
> my only
>  hope! 
Take a look at pungi.  It was used to produce the Fedora 7 cds,
including ppc, and thus knows about all the right mkisofs flags to use
to make bootable ppc isos.

http://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/pungi

You'll want to look in the pypungi/pungi.py file for mkisofs calls.

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE      (jkeating.livejournal.com)
Fedora Project          (fedoraproject.org/wiki/JesseKeating)
GPG Public Key          (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)

[Alan McKay]

>  http://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/pungi 
We'd heard of this and plan to start using it going forward.   We just
were not at the point where we wanted to introduce / figure out a new
tool.

But right now  rather than figure out a new tool / add a new tool I'd
just like to get my incantation correct :-)   But since I'm pretty
much at a roadblock now without this, I'll download pungi right now
and have a look at it to see how easy it is to figure out.

In the meantime while I'm looking at pungi, I would still like to hear
from others about what's wrong with my incantation w.r.t. the error
I'm getting.    Short / Immediate term I just want it to work.
Medium/Long term definitely want to be working  with pungi.

thanks,
-Alan

-- 
"Aikido has but one principle - the universal reality of life"
               - Mitsugi Saotome

[Jesse Keating]

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:32:01 -0400
"Alan McKay" <alan.mckay(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

>  In the meantime while I'm looking at pungi, I would still like to
> hear
>  from others about what's wrong with my incantation w.r.t. the error
>  I'm getting.    Short / Immediate term I just want it to work.
>  Medium/Long term definitely want to be working  with pungi. 
What I meant was look at the pungi source code for the mkisofs syntax.

https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/pungi/browser/pypungi/pungi.py#...  From there
on we setup the mkisofs calls, swapping in arguments based on what arch is being made.

For reference the command that was used to create Fedora 7 ppc isos was:

/usr/bin/mkisofs -v -U -J -R -T -part -hfs -r -l -sysid PPC -no-desktop -allow-multidot
-chrp-boot -map /usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/boot/mapping -magic
/usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/boot/magic -hfs-bless /srv/pungi/f7gold/7/Fedora/ppc/os/ppc/mac
-V "Fedora 7 ppc DVD" -o /srv/pungi/f7gold/7/Fedora/ppc/iso/F-7-ppc-DVD.iso
/srv/pungi/f7gold/7/Fedora/ppc/os

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE      (jkeating.livejournal.com)
Fedora Project          (fedoraproject.org/wiki/JesseKeating)
GPG Public Key          (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)

[Alan McKay]

Well, I still can't boot the thing on my G4 :-(   I'm now using
precisely the command give here below from the FC release.  I don't
think it matters that I'm not making a DVD but rather a CD.   The only
differences in my incantation vs the one below is that instead of
/srv/pungi/f7/blah/blah I have my own path to my .iso being produced,
and my own path to the contents of  the FC6 CD1 which I've blown open
into my filesystem.   mkisofs completes and then I burn the CD with :

sudo cdrecord -v speed=4 dev=/dev/cdwriter /path/to/my.iso

All I get is "Booting CDROM..." and then it hangs

Anyway, looks like it's time to dig into pungi unless someone else has
an idea what I'm doing wrong here.


/usr/bin/mkisofs -v -U -J -R -T -part -hfs -r -l -sysid PPC
-no-desktop -allow-multidot -chrp-boot -map
/usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/boot/mapping -magic
/usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/boot/magic -hfs-bless
/srv/pungi/f7gold/7/Fedora/ppc/os/ppc/mac -V "Fedora 7 ppc DVD" -o
/srv/pungi/f7gold/7/Fedora/ppc/iso/F-7-ppc-DVD.iso
/srv/pungi/f7gold/7/Fedora/ppc/os

>  

-- 
"Aikido has but one principle - the universal reality of life"
               - Mitsugi Saotome

[Alan McKay]

One final question I have I guess before digging into pungi.
Will it matter that my stuff is based on the FC6 CD1?   I see the
below command was used to produce FC7.   Also, my build machine on
which I'm doing all this is FC6 PPC.

If this does matter, do you  have the magic command that was used to
produce FC6?

Thanks again folks.

>  /usr/bin/mkisofs -v -U -J -R -T -part -hfs -r -l -sysid PPC
>  -no-desktop -allow-multidot -chrp-boot -map
>  /usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/boot/mapping -magic
>  /usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/boot/magic -hfs-bless
>  /srv/pungi/f7gold/7/Fedora/ppc/os/ppc/mac -V "Fedora 7 ppc DVD" -o
>  /srv/pungi/f7gold/7/Fedora/ppc/iso/F-7-ppc-DVD.iso
>  /srv/pungi/f7gold/7/Fedora/ppc/os 


-- 
"Aikido has but one principle - the universal reality of life"
               - Mitsugi Saotome

[Jesse Keating]

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 12:56:15 -0400
"Alan McKay" <alan.mckay(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

>  One final question I have I guess before digging into pungi.
>  Will it matter that my stuff is based on the FC6 CD1?   I see the
>  below command was used to produce FC7.   Also, my build machine on
>  which I'm doing all this is FC6 PPC.
>  
>  If this does matter, do you  have the magic command that was used to
>  produce FC6? 
I don't think it should matter, but I've been wrong before in the past
(:

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE      (jkeating.livejournal.com)
Fedora Project          (fedoraproject.org/wiki/JesseKeating)
GPG Public Key          (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)

[Alan McKay]

>  I don't think it should matter, but I've been wrong before in
> the past
>  (: 
Right now I'm burning the original FC6 CD1 to test to make sure it boots.
Just to eliminate the possibility of problems with my G4.

-- 
"Aikido has but one principle - the universal reality of life"
               - Mitsugi Saotome

[Alan McKay]

>  Right now I'm burning the original FC6 CD1 to test to make sure
> it boots.
>  Just to eliminate the possibility of problems with my G4. 
OK, progress.   Sort of.
The original FC6 CD1 boots just fine in my test machine.

So I decided to try to blow-open FC6 and just repackage it without
making any changes at all.  I took the ISO on my build machine, and
mounted it loopback.  Then :

cp -a /path/to/mounted/fc6-iso /path/to/fc6-copy

Then I used the mkisofs command that was used to produce FC7, and then
burned the ISO, and it does not boot!

Here is the exact command I used with my real paths shorted to
"/path/to" for readability since they were really long :

/usr/bin/mkisofs -v -U -J -R -T -part -hfs -r -l -sysid PPC
-no-desktop -allow-multidot -chrp-boot -map
/usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/boot/mapping -magic
/usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/boot/magic -hfs-bless
/path/to/fc6-orig/ppc/mac
-V "Fedora 7 ppc DVD" -o
/path/to/fc6-orig.iso
/path/to/fc6-orig

This is all being run on an FC6 G4

What gives?
Something in the "cp -a" is boffing me?   It worked on I386

Now I'm going to try the same thing but just repackage the mounted
ISO, not the copy of it.  If that one fails then I know there is a
problem with the "cp -a" and so I'll change it to using tar commands
to accomplish the same thing and preserved permissions.


-- 
"Aikido has but one principle - the universal reality of life"
               - Mitsugi Saotome

[Jesse Keating]

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 14:17:43 -0400
"Alan McKay" <alan.mckay(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

>  -map
>  /usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/boot/mapping -magic
>  /usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/boot/magic -hfs-bless 
Just to verify, do you have anaconda-runtime installed?  Do these files
you're referencing exist?

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE      (jkeating.livejournal.com)
Fedora Project          (fedoraproject.org/wiki/JesseKeating)
GPG Public Key          (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)

[Alan McKay]

>  Just to verify, do you have anaconda-runtime installed?  Do these
> files
>  you're referencing exist? 
Yup.   I installed the RPMs myself just before beginning this journey.

BTW, I just realised after sending that, that in the copy I did with
"cp -a" I forgot to remove all the "TRANS.TBL" files before running
mkisofs, so I'm re-doing now with that but it will take a while.
I'll remember to do it as well with the experiment I do in just
re-spinning the ISO without first copying it out somewhere.   But I'll
copy the ISO first so as to preserve the original.

-- 
"Aikido has but one principle - the universal reality of life"
               - Mitsugi Saotome

[Alan McKay]

>  BTW, I just realised after sending that, that in the copy I did with
>  "cp -a" I forgot to remove all the "TRANS.TBL" files before running
>  mkisofs, so I'm re-doing now with that but it will take a while.
>  I'll remember to do it as well with the experiment I do in just
>  re-spinning the ISO without first copying it out somewhere.   But I'll
>  copy the ISO first so as to preserve the original. 
Progress!!!

When I removed the TRANS.TBL files and produced and ISO with the
results of my "cp -a" and then burned it, the CD boots!

Now, I know in my original tree there are no TRANS.TBL files so that
was not my original problem.  But at least now I know I can produce a
bootable CD, so now I can build up on this progress one step at a time
to discover just where it fails.

Thanks a million everyone!   I hope to be able to take it from here.
I'm going to keep monitoring this list - will try to answer any
questions I can.

cheers,
-Alan

-- 
"Aikido has but one principle - the universal reality of life"
               - Mitsugi Saotome

[Paul Nasrat]

On Thu, 2007-07-19 at 10:14 -0400, Alan McKay wrote:
>  Hi Folks,
>  
>  I'm trying to make a bootable install CD for PPC.   We've already done
>  this for i386 and what we did was blow open the FC6 CD1, remove what
>  we don't need, add what we do need, then glue it all back together
>  with a magical incantation of "mkisofs".  Works great!  (We're
>  installing FC6 and our stuff goes on top of it)
>  
>  PPC has been a really different beast as I'm sure you all know.
>  We're using the same approach by blowing open the FC6 CD1 but are
>  having trouble with the magic incantation.   I came upon this list via
>  google (only after some  2 or 3 hours of googling and reading,
>  unfortunately), and found this thread from March of this year
>  concerning this exact topic :
>  
>  http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/fedora-ppc/2007-March/000971.html
>  
>  I  thought I was home free, but when I try what pnasrat suggests, I
>  get this error :
>  
>  Uh oh, I cant find the boot image "./yaboot"! 

Try using ppc/chrp/yaboot it looks in the tree not outside it I think -
check the cdrkit source for details.

Paul

[Alan McKay]

>  Try using ppc/chrp/yaboot it looks in the tree not outside it I think
> -
>  check the cdrkit source for details. 
Oh I'm a dope!   I did not try relative to the root of the CD!

It's chugging right along nicely ... thanks kindly folks!   And
especially thanks kindly for Fedora PPC!

-- 
"Aikido has but one principle - the universal reality of life"
               - Mitsugi Saotome