Booting from TFTP &boot-installer-intro-net.xml; Booting from CD-ROM &boot-installer-intro-cd.xml; Booting from Firmware &boot-installer-intro-firmware.xml; Booting the SS4000-E Due to limitations in the SS4000-E firmware, it unfortunately is not possible to boot the installer without the use of a serial port at this time. To boot the installer, you will need a serial nullmodem cable; a computer with a serial port A USB serial converter will also work. ; and a ribbon cable with a male DB9 connector at one end, and a 10-pin .1" IDC header at the other This cable is often found in older desktop machines with builtin 9-pin serial ports. . To boot the SS4000-E, use your serial nullmodem cable and the ribbon cable to connect to the serial port of the SS4000-E, and reboot the machine. You need to use a serial terminal application to communicate with the machine; a good option on a &debian; GNU/Linux is to use the cu program, in the package of the same name. Assuming the serial port on your computer is to be found on /dev/ttyS0, use the following command line: cu -lttyS0 -s115200 If using Windows, you may want to consider using the program hyperterminal. Use a baud rate of 115200, 8 bits word length, no stop bits, and one parity bit. When the machine boots, you will see the following line of output: No network interfaces found EM-7210 ver.T04 2005-12-12 (For ver.AA) == Executing boot script in 1.000 seconds - enter ^C to abort At this point, hit Control-C to interrupt the boot loader Note that you have only one second to do so; if you miss this window, just powercycle the machine and try again. . This will give you the RedBoot prompt. Enter the following commands: load -v -r -b 0x01800000 -m ymodem ramdisk.gz load -v -r -b 0x01008000 -m ymodem zImage exec -c "console=ttyS0,115200 rw root=/dev/ram mem=256M@0xa0000000" -r 0x01800000 After every load command, the system will expect a file to be transmitted using the YMODEM protocol. When using cu, make sure you have the package lrzsz installed, then hit enter, followed by the ~< escape sequence to start an external program, and run sb initrd.gz or sb vmlinuz. Alternatively, it is possible to load the kernel and ramdisk using HTTP rather than YMODEM. This is faster, but requires a working HTTP server on the network. To do so, first switch the bootloader to RAM mode: fis load rammode g This will seemingly restart the machine; but in reality, it loads redboot to RAM and restarts it from there. Not doing this step will cause the system to hang in the necessary ip_address step that comes next. You will need to hit Ctrl-C again to interrupt the boot. Then: ip_address -l 192.168.2.249 -h 192.168.2.4 load -v -r -b 0x01800000 -m http /initrd.gz load -v -r -b 0x01008000 -m http /zImage exec -c "console=ttyS0,115200 rw root=/dev/ram mem=256M@0xa0000000" -r 0x01800000 Where 192.168.2.249 is the IP address of the installed system and 192.168.2.4 the IP address of the HTTP server containing the kernel and ramdisk files. The installer will now start as usual.