Booting with TFTP
&boot-installer-intro-net.xml;
On machines with OpenBoot, simply enter the boot monitor on the
machine which is being installed (see
).
Use the command boot net to boot from a TFTP
and RARP server, or try boot net:bootp or
boot net:dhcp to boot from a TFTP and BOOTP
or DHCP server.
Booting from a CD-ROM
&boot-installer-intro-cd.xml;
Most OpenBoot versions support the boot cdrom
command which is simply an alias to boot from the SCSI device on ID 6
(or the secondary master for IDE based systems).
Booting from Floppies
Floppy images are currently only available for sparc32, but, for technical
reasons, not for official releases. (The reason is that they can only be
built as root, which is not supported by our build daemons.)
Look under daily built images
on the
Debian Installer project website for links
to floppy images for sparc32.
To boot from floppy on a Sparc, use
Stop-A -> OpenBoot: "boot floppy"
Be warned that the newer Sun4u (ultra) architecture does not support
floppy booting. A typical error message is Bad magic
number in disk label - Can't open disk label package.
Several Sparcs (e.g. Ultra 10) have an OBP bug that prevents them from
booting (instead of not supporting booting at all). The appropriate
OBP update can be downloaded as product ID 106121 from
.
If you are booting from the floppy, and you see messages such as
Fatal error: Cannot read partition
Illegal or malformed device name
then it is possible that floppy booting is simply not supported on
your machine.
IDPROM Messages
If you cannot boot because you get messages about a problem with
IDPROM
, then it's possible that your NVRAM battery, which
holds configuration information for you firmware, has run out. See the
Sun NVRAM FAQ for more
information.