Boot failure in Bochs

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Boot failure in Bochs
started by: salvois

Posted by salvois on Mar. 13 2006,23:06

Greetings,
I'm searching for a GNU/Linux distro to put in my old Pentium 90-based PC. DSL sounds just perfect, so I'm trying to test it in Bochs 2.2.6 first. FWIW I'm used with Debian Etch, although not a GNU/Linux master.
I downloaded current.iso, that is 2.2b at the time of writing, and checked its MD5. Set up a Bochs virtual machine with 24 MiB of RAM (as my real hardware) and booted from the CD image as hdb, no floppy, 1 GB hard disk image as hda freshly dd'd from /dev/zero (CHS 2112/16/63).
I've tried the default boot, expert mode, failsafe and install, but with all of them the system refuses to start with the following messages (this is from expert, even rising to 64 MiB of RAM, no SCSI and floppy modules, unknown hda partition table of course):
Accessing DSL image at /dev/scd0...
Setting paths...awk: awk: No such file or directory
awk: awk: No such file or directory
Total memory: kB
expr: syntax error
expr: syntax error
Creating directories and symlinks on ramdisk...:cp: memory exhausted
Done.
Starting init process.
INIT: version 2.78-knoppix booting
INIT: No inittab file found
Enter runlevel:
Everything useless at this point. The same happens if I use no HD image.
Thanks for any hints,
Salvo

Posted by pr0f3550r on Mar. 14 2006,12:26

I guess:
1) realistically you need 128MB in the virtual machine.
2)Why Bochs? Qemu should be faster/more efficient.

Posted by salvois on Mar. 15 2006,17:31

Thanks for your reply.
For 1, it seems strange to me I'd need 128 MiB of RAM, as DSL claims very little of it. If I can't run in 24 MiB on my real machine, it won't do the work. Anyway, there's the same problem with 128 or 256 MiB of RAM for the virtual machine.
For 2, just because I'm used with it.
I'll try on real hardware as soon as I have some spare time, but the behavior in Bochs still bugs me.

Posted by fang11 on Mar. 20 2006,01:06

wouldn't it be easier to just test it on a cd? o.o

Posted by salvois on Mar. 21 2006,21:06

It wouldn't, since at the very least I should burn a CD, turn off my working machine, detach monitor, keyboard, mouse and power cord, reconnect them to the testing machine and boot up. ;-) And that machine does not boot from CDs, BTW. In Bochs (or your favorite emulator, I guess) I can try several configurations in seconds.