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3.4 Installing MILO

Installing MILO

For most systems, the best method of booting Red Hat Linux/Alpha is using the MILO, the Linux/Alpha miniloader. You may either load MILO directly from your system's firmware, or use the ARC console to load MILO as an alternate ``operating system''. Details on these procedures are in the MILO HOWTO, which is available as Appendix D.

The full MILO tree is available on the Red Hat CD in the milo/ directory. It contains the latest documentation and MILO images available when this CD was manufactured (later versions of MILO are regularly made available at gatekeeper.dec.com). The milo/images/ directory also contains floppy disk images that can be used with the ARC console to boot directly into MILO. They contain MILO and linload.exe.

3.4.1 Making a MILO Floppy

Making a MILO Floppy

To make a MILO floppy, you'll need to use either the dd command on a Linux (or Digital Unix) system, or the rawrite.exe program (on the Red Hat CD) on a Microsoft Windows NT or MS-DOS system. To use dd, first mount the CD (e.g., under /mnt/cdrom/), choose the appropriate image for your system from milo/images/, and:

cd /mnt/cdrom
dd if=milo/images/your-image.img of=/dev/fd0

To use rawrite, choose the appropriate image for your system, and (assuming your CD-ROM is drive d:):

d:
cd milo/images
\dosutils\rawrite.exe

rawrite first asks you for the name of a diskette image; enter the name of the MILO image for your system (e.g., noname-udb.img). Then it asks for a diskette drive to write the image to; enter a:.

Label the floppy ``MILO floppy''.

3.4.2 What if MILO doesn't work?

What if MILO doesn't work?

If MILO is not supported on your machine, you need to boot the floppy or the Red Hat CD directly from the SRM console. Information on doing this is available from the Red Hat Software web site at
http://www.redhat.com/linux-info/alpha/faq.

Please Note: If you are having trouble with MILO, the first thing to try is a newer MILO.


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