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Subject: i86 installation woes -- resolved
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Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 04:18:49 GMT
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I've got an old 286 that has been sitting for a while, and really wanted
something better that DOS 5/Win 3.1 ... and I found Minix.  Hardware: 8
Mhz/4 MB RAM/40+ MB IDE HD/VGA/1.44 MB floppy.

I dutifully downloaded all the required files for 2.0.2, and
concatenated ROOT.MNX and USR.MNX onto a floppy.  This booted, but
refused to properly access USR mounted as fd0c.  XTBOOT provided no
relief.  As I found nothing helpful on the official site, I looked
closely at the file sizes and guessed that there was a partition size
issue.

I have not traced this back to its source (did the partition handling
code change somewhere along the line?), but the following allowed me to
create properly bootable floppy under Linux:

    dd if=ROOT.MNX of=/dev/fd0 bs=18k

(result is 26+1)

    dd if=USR.MNX of=/dev/fd0 bs=18k seek=27

This puts the USR image at a cylinder boundary.

    fdisk /dev/fd0u1440

Delete partition 3, and create a new partition 3 cylinders 28 to 68.
[keystrokes something like: d \r 3 \r n \r p \r 3 \r 28 \r 68 \r]  Then
w to write and exit.  You may see an error here, which seems to go away
if you fix the first partition (but that is harder and does not affect
the outcome.)

YMMV, but this got me booted and installed (manually as the automatic
partitioning code failed to run on my translated drive geometry. :-/ )

