boot vfat trouble shooting

The "boot vfat" command which is also assigned to the "letter" button by bootldr
has very poor diagnostics when it comes to errors. Here are some helpful hints to
trace problems.

"boot vfat" really is a macro for a sequence of other bootldr commands.
I have not looked at the latest source but
http://www.handhelds.org/handhelds-faq/dualboot.html claims the macro is

   1. sleeve insert
   2. pcmcia insert
   3. ide attach (probably obsolete now - hangs my ipaq)
   4. vfat mount 0
   5. vfat read boot/params
   6. eval params if they were found
   7. vfat read boot/zimage
   8. vfat read boot/initrd
   9. boots the kernel, passing initrd

executing these step by step should yield better information then "boot vfat".

after step two, do a "ide ptable" to check whether your disk can be read:

boot> ide ptable
ptable signature=0000AA55
C19F3D0C: 00 01 01 00 06 0F 3F 13-3F 00 00 00 81 4E 00 00 | ......?.?....N..
C19F3D1C: 00 00 01 14 83 0F FF E0-C0 4E 00 00 30 F7 0E 00 | .........N..0...
C19F3D2C: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 | ................
C19F3D3C: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 | ................

I found that often my cf would not even be detected and yet the macro was not aborted.
BTW: It seems that the dual sleeve has problems with some CF to pcmcia adapters.
The adaptor that comes with the sleeve works fine, though.

after step 4 test whether the directories of your vfat file system are ok using

boot> vfat ls
 boot
   attr=00000010
   first_cluster=00000002
   n_bytes=00000000

boot> vfat ls boot
vfat_find_dir_entry: fname='boot'
                   dirname=''
                  basename='boot'
  searching root_dir_entries
vfat ls: rc=00000000
vfat ls: entry.n_bytes=00000000
vfat_read_clusters_offset: reached VFAT_EOC at bytes_read=00000800
 .
   attr=00000010
   first_cluster=00000002
   n_bytes=00000000
 ..
   attr=00000010
   first_cluster=00000000
   n_bytes=00000000
 initrd
   attr=00000020
   first_cluster=00000003
   n_bytes=00741588
 params
   attr=00000020
   first_cluster=00000E86
   n_bytes=000000A9
 zimage
   attr=00000020
   first_cluster=00000E87
   n_bytes=000B81F8

hope this helps,

Robert
Received on Tue Sep 23 2003 - 16:37:02 EDT