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From: cwr@crash.cts.com (Will Rose)
Subject: Re: 1.7 on XT - MAJOR install problems
Organization: CTS Network Services (CTSNET), San Diego, CA
Date: Sun, 2 Jul 1995 15:51:29 GMT
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Dan_Newcombe (NEWCOMBE@AA.csc.peachnet.edu) wrote:
: Okay...I will try to include all the details, though
: this was last week, and I was getting pretty fed up
: with the whole thing!

: Anyway - I have an XT, with 2 360K drives, and a 20M
: hard drive (and another 20M drive to be put it.)  For
: installing, I yanked the 1.44M drive from my 386 and
: put it on my XT.  This worked fine.  I booted the
: tinyroot, and then had it load the usr disk.  This
: worked fine.

: I was following the instructions from the WWW manual
: page on how to install.  This is where things started
: going bad.  For starters, the install script would not
: work!  So I followed the manual install instructions.

: I dedicated the whole hard disk to Minix, set up the
: different sub-partitions, installed a minimal /usr
: partition and rebooted.  When it came up, I entered
: the boot monitor and told it my /usr partition.  It
: mounted it no problem.  I then did the command
: to start loading the /usr disks (vol something piped
: through zcat then through tar).  That did not work at
: all.  It told me it couldn't read the disk...though if
: I just did the vol command, it had no problem dumping
: the disk to the screen (how annoying!)

: Also, when I booted from the hard drive, not the floopy
: and told it I had an XT style controller, it crapped out
: when it tried to mount the /root partition, though if I
: mounted it from the tinyroot disk there was no problem.

: So am I the only one that is having this much trouble
: with 1.7 on my XT, or is it bad everywhere?

It's not that bad everywhere, certainly - I booted it
on my XT (which runs 1.5) as an exercise.

It may be that the boot disk is using the bios_wini driver,
and your XT controller is non-conforming (as far as I can
tell, *most* XT controllers are non-conforming.  Way back,
I bought a controller just to run Minix and still had to
recompile.  But bios_wini always works.).

If it will dump vol to the screen, but fail on  the full
vol 720 | zcat | tar xf - pipeline, then perhaps it's out
of memory for the processes.  I remember this error message
being a bit confusing - I'm not sure where in the pipeline
it's coming from.

One idea would be to start the pipe, and immediately hit F1.
That should give you a dump of the process table, which would
show you where all your memory is going, and whether you have
enough of it.  You might have to build a smaller ramdisk,
or better still set aside a small hd partition to mount as
the root file system to keep all the RAM for processes.

Another trick, since you have disk space, would be to try
vol 720 | zcat >/usr/tmp/foo.  You'd end up with a large file foo
on the hard disk, which you could then unpack with tar.  This
assumes that foo is less that half the size of the hd partition,
or that you mount a second hd.

Sudden thought - you did run mkfs on the hd partition, right?

Good luck - Will
cwr@crash.cts.com

