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Subject: Re: minix for a 286...
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I noticed this from Martijn van Buul, and it made me think:

   "Could you please set your quoting characters to something more appropriate?
   "Thank you.

Is that better?


   "This would seem like a problem while reading the bootblock. This could
   "be a bad disk (Those disks you formatted came out with no bad blocks, right?)

OK, thats something others have said too, so I'll assume it's a
bodgy disk, and try again.

   "-or- you booted the wrong disk. Only the "ROOT" image is bootable. You
   "can combine ROOT and USR on one disk if you have HD-disks (and -drives!),
   "but you'll have to put them in the right order. FDVOL is a garbage-in,
   "garbage-out program. (So 'fdvol A: 1440 ROOT USR' will work, 'fdvol A: 1440
   "USR ROOT' will not)

Nope, definately put root first and used high density disks on a high
density drive.

   "ROOT and USR are -not- compressed, but raw dumps of a filesystem. Only
   "USR.TGZ is compressed (it is a compressed TAR-archive), and that one
   "isn't even a filesystem in the first place. Don't try to boot from that.
   "It will give you the symptoms you described.

Ahhh, I see. I assumed that the dot taz extension on the third one implied
the other two (root & usr) were compressed too. I still doesn't chenge the
fact that they wont boot, but now I can rule oout bad images.

   "If it does make any sense: Linux and FreeBSD (and numerous others, I
   "presume) do have compressed disk images. The kernel knows how to handle
   "them.

Sure, once th OS has booted of course, off non-compressed disk images.
What I meant was that a boot disk image *cannot* be compressed on a disk,
those quoted OSes use a non-compressed loader to boot the machine
then anything can be compressed after that, hey, even the kernal itself!

   "ROOT and USR aren't combined into one filesystem. They're just two filesystems
   "combined on one disk. Partitioning isn't necessarily restricted to harddisks.
   "Floppies can be partitioned too, which is exactly what's happening here.

OK, OK, you learn something everyday.
As an aside, which partition is the active 'bootable' partition on a
multi-partition floppy? The first partition? Or is there a sort of
'active' partition in the way we make an active partition on our
harddisks?

OK, well thanks for the help, I'll assume there something wrong with the
disks etc...

Thanks for all your help.

-- 
                    ***
         Christopher John Harrison
         3rd Yr CS RMIT University
          charriso@cs.rmit.edu.au
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