*BSD News Article 6952


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!sgiblab!darwin.sura.net!jvnc.net!nuscc!ntuix!eoahmad
From: eoahmad@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg (Othman Ahmad)
Subject: Re: Installation Guide for 386BSD and MSDOS 5.0 with boot switch
Message-ID: <1992Oct23.030011.18585@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg>
Organization: Nanyang Technological University - Singapore
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]
References: <1c7dnuINNqq@mailgzrz.TU-Berlin.DE>
Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1992 03:00:11 GMT
Lines: 53

ronald (ronald@marie.physik.tu-berlin.de) wrote:
: 
: ***********************************************************************
: 	INSTALLATION HINTS FOR 386BSD 0.1
: 
: 	Ronald Holzloehner,  Marc Stroh 
: 	ronald@marie.physik.tu-berlin.de
: 	Berlin, Germany
: ***********************************************************************
: 
: This may be some helpful hints on installing 386BSD 0.1
: 	on ** A SECONDARY MSDOS-PARTITION **
: and using a Boot-Switch-Utility to choose one OS.
: 
: I think more than 70% of the 386BSD-users would like to boot MSDOS (either
: on the same phys. drive as BSD or on a second one) as easy as UNIX.
: Therefor, it's necessary to have both OS's on the first (master) drive.
: On the other hand, you can't use then the simple automatic installation rou-
: tine provided by "dist.fs" and it's "install"-command since you have
: to tell 386BSD on which sector to start etc.
: Since this is not so easy and you've to know *physical* data of
: your HD in order not to write over the boundaries, installation may last
: long and lead to some crashes.           
:    
: Here's a method (the "DOS-Method" :-) ) how to do kinda shortcut and
: install the basic system in one day rather than in a week :-)) 
: Since it uses MSDOS's "fdisk" (smart!) it won't corrupt your disk.
: -> Comes from a summary from   israel@dvinci.USask.Ca <-
:  	
: 	* It's not my idea, I'm just summarizing *
: 	 ( so don't blame me if ...  8-}  )
: 	
: It worked great on our 386DX 33Mhz , 8 megs RAM and a Conner 212 Mb AT-Bus HD
:  with MSDOS 5.0 :

This is an excellent instruction but it may not work all the time.
Based on the latest information I would like to recommend the following steps.

- boot MSDOS on floppy
- run ide_conf.exe to see the default geometry of your hard-disk,
the default is the last figure. After ide_conf, it will boot your disk,

-run BIOS install, which is initiated by DEL key in AMI bios,
-choose type 47 for harddisk C entry,
-enter the cylinders, heads, and sectors numbers as shown by ide_conf
-the second hard-disk must be done the same way, repeat the previous 3 steps
-reboot 

These steps are temporary. Terry Lambert may try to work out a new boot-disk
that make the above steps unnecessary, but they are still important.
	If you want maximium performance for your IDE hard-disk, run ide_conf
as well, to make sure that it uses its default geometry.