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From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Subject: Re: DOS and 386BSD
Message-ID: <1992Oct12.171340.23826@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu
Organization: Weber State University (Ogden, UT)
References: <92286.101837K390670@ALIJKU11.BITNET>
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 92 17:13:40 GMT
Lines: 86
In article <92286.101837K390670@ALIJKU11.BITNET> <K390670@ALIJKU11.BITNET> writes:
>My machine is a 486-50 with 212MB Conner CP3204F (IDE) and 543MB Conner
>CP3540 (SCSI-2), the latter of which is connected to an Adaptec 1542B.
>
>I have painstakingly followed Terry Lambert's advice about setting the
>IDE drive to its "native" parameters and about putting 386BSD (ptntype A5)
>*first* on the disk, DOS second.
>
>Besides that I lose all tracks beyond 1023 with this method, install
>still fails:
>>xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (some info about super-block backups)
>>newfs: ioctl (WDINFO): No such process
>>newfs: /dev/rwd0a: can't rewrite disk label
>>Could not format filesystem. Installation failed.
>
>Any suggestions are highly welcome.
There's still the possibility of picking a cylinder boundry which is both
a physical cylinder boundery and a translated cyliner boundry at the same
time. The problem you appear to be having is related to the ability for
the DOS-style master boot record to find the boot code, but the inability
of the 386BSD boot to find the rest of the code it's supposed to be loading;
it's likely that the 386BSD partition doesn't start on a cylinder boundry.
If the arrangement were( '|' represents a cylinder boundry):
translated: |-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----| ...
physical: |---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| ...
A B C
A would be where the DOS MBR goes, B would be where the 386BSD boot goes,
and C would be where the DOS partition started.
The boot table in the first 512 bytes following location A would be required
to be modified for the 386BSD partition to refer to the physical track/sector/
etc.
This requires that you find the LCF (least common factor) for the physical
vs. the translated cylinder boundries, and that you make a small empty
partition following the boot information in 'A' to cause the cylinder
boundries for both the physical and translated cylinders to fall on the
same offset.
Alternately, you could put the 386BSD partition at C, ignore B, and start
the DOS partition (using the translated geometry) immediately following A.
This may or may not require modifications to asboot, depending on how
careful you are. It probably will.
>As the 386BSD installation on the *whole* IDE performs flawlessly, I
>think the best way to do it anyway is to dedicate the whole IDE to BSD,
>to enable BIOS emulation of the Adaptec (which I tried to avoid up till
>now), and to install DOS (and, by the way, OS/2 2.0 and Windows NT)
>on the SCSI.Besides not losing 50MB of the IDE, switching to and fro
>386BSD becomes ridiculously simple:
>In the machine's setup, set drive C: to "user defined":
>386BSD is run
>In the machine's setup, set drive C: to "not installed":
>DOS (or Win NT or OS/2 2.0) is run
>
>Any comments on that?
You could also make a small installation of 386BSD on the SCSI, newfs th
IDE (since 386BSD should find it, even if it's disabled) mount the IDE as
/mnt, copy the base contents of /usr to /mnt, delete the contents of /usr,
and cause the IDE to be mounted as /usr. The n finish the 386BSD install
normally. Before rebooting, modify /etc/fstab and /etc/rc to mount /usr
before it is needed to execute anything.
This would allow you to boot everything off the SCSI, but still use the
IDE for the vast majority of 386BSD. Given your OS/2 and NT requirements,
this would probably be best. If you do this, you should probably get one
of the boot selectors off of agate.berkeley.edu and remember to *NOT*
install the OS/2 boot manager.
Terry Lambert
terry@icarus.weber.edu
terry_lambert@novell.com
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
--
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