Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
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From: kjb@cs.vu.nl (Kees J. Bot)
Subject: Re: more installation silliness :)
Nntp-Posting-Host: hornet.cs.vu.nl
References: <radugaDB32nJ.3yv@netcom.com> <DB3qxx.5wA@crash.cts.com> <radugaDB43ov.Fxx@netcom.com>
Sender: news@cs.vu.nl
Organization: Fac. Wiskunde & Informatica, VU, Amsterdam
Date: Mon, 3 Jul 1995 11:20:12 GMT
Message-ID: <DB50to.H3L.0.-s@cs.vu.nl>
Lines: 56

raduga@netcom.com writes:

>Will Rose (cwr@crash.cts.com) wrote:
>: raduga@netcom.com wrote:

>: This may not be a driver problem - the standard root image
>: is ~600K, which will leave far too little memory over to
>: do anything.  In fact, it may not be able to initialise
>: the HD buffers, which would explain not recognising the HD.
>: The TINYROOT system is 200KB.


>when i boot with tinyroot, and mount my HD as /
>i can get ~450k free out of 640 (real mode)

>when i boot with ROOT, and mount FD as /
>i can get ~800k free out of 1024 (protected mode)

>my HD is apparently using BIOS routines for i/o.
>does the ROOT image not support this?

TINYROOT only has the BIOS and XT disk drivers to keep it small.  ROOT
has all drivers except the BIOS driver.  One of the drivers is an ESDI
driver.  Did you try 'hd=esdi'?

>is there a documented procedure for making a bootable
>HD from the tinyroot boot disk?
>what i've seen so far, seems to be more directed toward
>making a bootable drive from the ROOT  disk
>(which has an image as /minix and etc)

One of the tricks to keep the TINYROOT file system small is that /boot
and /minix are not in the file system as files, they are outside of it
on the raw disk.

This can be seen if you look at the image boot variable.  The setting
'image=441:203' means that the kernel image starts at sector 441 and is
203 sectors long.

So you can retrieve the image with the command:

	dd if=/dev/fd0 of=image skip=441 count=203

It wouldn't hurt to add a simple script to the distribution that does
this, I guess.  I never imagined that there would be so many people
trying to run Minix on old hardware like XT's, so TINYROOT did not get
all my attention.  (Besides this is a *beta* release, meant to shake
out bugs.)

BTW, it is not necessary to use 'cc -F' to keep cc from running passes
in parallel connected by pipes.  The ANSI C compiler never uses pipes
between passes.  (I timed it with the old compiler, -F hardly makes a
difference in speed.)
--
	                        Kees J. Bot  (kjb@cs.vu.nl)
	              Systems Programmer, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
