Up and Running with TLVC

Boot

It's an exciting moment. The system is ready to boot - maybe for the first time. From floppy most likely - as described in the Configure and Build TLVC wiki page.

At this point, getting anything at all on the screen is a major milestone. The boot process goes like this:

1. System power-on or reset will eventually attempt to load the boot sector from the device specified in your BIOS configuration. Or - if the system is old - it will try floppy A first, then the hard disk.
2. The boot loader assumes a PC-compatible BIOS is available to access the boot device, and calls the BIOS to read the root directory to find the kernel, a file named 'linux'.
3. The 'linux' file is read and dots printed on the screen, one per sector. Anything other than dots means trouble, but not necessarily serious trouble. More about that later.
4. If the kernel load succeeds, the boot program will jump to it and the kernel will start initialising itself and the system and continuously notifying you about what's going on. This means you will have a good idea about what the problem is if something goes wrong.
5. If everything goes well (which usually doesn't happen until you've made adjustments to your kernel or configuration or both), you'll end up with a login: prompt, which is another milestone.

The bootloader

Boot errors

Kernel startup

[TBD]