[9fans] installation on SATYA disk failed

[9fans] installation on SATYA disk failed

[cej]

Hi, folks!

I have bought a WDC WD1002FBYS-01A6B0 SATA II disk to install a Plan 9 on it. However , my CD/DVD drive is not SATA, but a rather old one hanging on an IDE cable (primary master). Moreover, there is only one IDE slot on the motherboard, thus I cannot make the CD to be 'secondary master'. Trying to boot from CD did not work any combination of sdXX!cdboot!9pcflop.gz Thus, I made a small DOS-formatted FAT16 partition on the SATA disk, copied files from installation floppy on it, and tried to boot from it:
boot from: bios0!9pcflop.gz

This is what I get:

PBS1...
Plan 9 from Bell Labs
ELCR:CCL8
pcirouting: South bridge 8086, 2810 not found
islba: drive 0x80 extensions version 48.0 cx 0x5
exgetsize: drive 0x80 info flags 0x0
bios0: drive 0x80: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes, type 3
reading drive 0x80 offset 0 into seg: off 0x6000000...biosdiskcall: int 13 op 042 drive 0x80 failed, ah error code 0x80
sectread: bios failed to read 512@sector 0 of 0x80
bios0!9fat does not contain a FAT file system

This seems to me like SATA disk is unreadable.

So, I added a second (slave) HD on IDE0, with a small FAT partition, etc., and booted:
sdB0!dos!9pcflop.gz
and voila, installer runs, but only up to the '[partdisk]: no disk devices were found on your system. The installation process cannot continue.'

I consulted the 9fans archives getting a hint that the SATA driver must be built in the 9pcflop.gz Now I am lost so I would be grateful for any advice.

Thanks, regards,

++pac.

Re: [9fans] installation on SATA disk failed

[cej]

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I have enabled AHCI in bios (instead of IDE mode before), now I can boot from sdE0!dos!9pcflop.gz, but only up to '[partdisk]: no disk devices were found on your system. The installation process cannot continue.'

I still get 'biosdiskcall: int 13 op 041 drive 0x80 failed, ah error code 0x1', but then everything seems OK:
ahci0: port 0xfebff800: hba sss1; ncs 31; coal 1; mports 3; led 1; clo 1; ems1;
unk: sata-II with 4 ports
sdiahci: drive 0 in state ready after 0 resets
sdiahci: drive 1 in state missing after 0 resets
     ...etc...


As mentioned, I can't process past [partdisk]. Can it be that 9load does not see the SATA disk? There is only a 20 MB FAT partition (primary) on it, the rest is free space.

I'm lost, please, help.

Best regards, thanks,
++pac.


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Re: [9fans] installation on SATYA disk failed

[erik quanstrom]

> This is what I get:
>
> PBS1...
> Plan 9 from Bell Labs
> ELCR:CCL8
> pcirouting: South bridge 8086, 2810 not found
> islba: drive 0x80 extensions version 48.0 cx 0x5
> exgetsize: drive 0x80 info flags 0x0
> bios0: drive 0x80: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes, type 3
> reading drive 0x80 offset 0 into seg: off 0x6000000...biosdiskcall: int 13 op 042 drive 0x80 failed, ah error code 0x80

i don't see those debugging statements on sources,
so clearly i could be misreading this.  but assuming
that i'm not confused about what that says,
wouldn't that segment:off be a problem?
as far as i know, 9load only maps 8mb.

> So, I added a second (slave) HD on IDE0, with a small FAT partition, etc., and booted:
> sdB0!dos!9pcflop.gz
> and voila, installer runs, but only up to the '[partdisk]: no disk devices were found on your system. The installation process cannot continue.'

/sys/src/9/pcflop has sdiahci commented out.  i would
think at this point we could trade sdmylex and sd53c8xx
for sdiahci.  (sadly, it's hard to find 5v pci slots anymore.)
but since you're not on a floppy, you can compile a
kernel with them all in.  you don't need to fit in 1.44mb.

- erik

Re: [9fans] installation on SATA disk failed

[erik quanstrom]

> I still get 'biosdiskcall: int 13 op 041 drive 0x80 failed, ah error code 0x1', but then everything seems OK:
> ahci0: port 0xfebff800: hba sss1; ncs 31; coal 1; mports 3; led 1; clo 1; ems1;
> unk: sata-II with 4 ports
> sdiahci: drive 0 in state ready after 0 resets

that message isn't very clear.  ready is good; a drive
has been detected and configured.  missing
is also good (if you don't have a drive on that port).
anything else indicates some confusion.

> As mentioned, I can't process past [partdisk].
> Can it be that 9load does not see the SATA disk?

have you opened another window to see what's in #S?

- erik

Re: [9fans] installation on SATYA disk failed

[geoff]

Installing off floppy has been seriously suboptimal for a long time.
It's probably time to finally kill it.  Surely no one still has
a machine with a floppy drive but no cd nor dvd drive.

I've just rebuilt /n/sources/plan9/386/9*load* from
/n/sources/plan9/sys/src/boot/pc.

Re: [9fans] installation on SATYA disk failed

[Bela Valek]

I suggest that you keep the floppy-install option. If Plan 9 is
installed, its normally on a virtual machine, or on an older computer
somewhere in the garage, often with floppy-drives only. But if its
time consuming to support it...

- Can you make it automatic? when you create the boot CD, generate the
floppy image as a byproduct.

- Can you provide a link to an older version of Plan 9 that still
supports this option?

Just dont make a feature disappear without trace, because the user
base is assuming that its there, and you send them a bad message about
the reliability of the product.

Re: [9fans] installation on SATYA disk failed

[erik quanstrom]

On Sun Jul 26 02:12:21 EDT 2009, bvalek2@gmail.com wrote:
> I suggest that you keep the floppy-install option. If Plan 9 is
> installed, its normally on a virtual machine, or on an older computer
> somewhere in the garage, often with floppy-drives only. But if its
> time consuming to support it...

do you have such a machine?  (i have a pentium ii and a 386 dx,
and both have cd rom drives)

supposing you do, do you have one that doesn't have a pata port?
cd rom drives are really cheep.  if you come to iwp9 i'll give you
a few.

- erik

Re: [9fans] installation on SATYA disk failed

[hiro]

All my floppy drives died and were thus disposed some years ago.

Re: [9fans] installation on SATYA disk failed

[Ethan Grammatikidis]

On Sun, 26 Jul 2009 10:08:25 -0400
erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net> wrote:

> On Sun Jul 26 02:12:21 EDT 2009, bvalek2@gmail.com wrote:
> > I suggest that you keep the floppy-install option. If Plan 9 is
> > installed, its normally on a virtual machine, or on an older computer
> > somewhere in the garage, often with floppy-drives only. But if its
> > time consuming to support it...
>
> do you have such a machine?  (i have a pentium ii and a 386 dx,
> and both have cd rom drives)
>
> supposing you do, do you have one that doesn't have a pata port?
> cd rom drives are really cheep.  if you come to iwp9 i'll give you
> a few.

If I hadn't had to downsize I'd still have half a dozen machines incapable
of booting from CD-ROM, I vaguely recall CD-ROM boot being an unusual
feature at some point.

Having said that, if I had a machine which wouldn't boot from CD-ROM
I'd install in another machine and copy the installation to the target
drive. I've done it many times with Linux in the past, once or twice
with Windows 98 if I remember right, and the hardest part was usually
transfering the target drive between machines. Actually sometimes the
hardest part with Linux was that daft LILO bootloader, it was quite a
puzzle but a solvable one. I'm pretty sure 9load won't give quite the
same trouble, but it may need a bit of care to set up right.

Hmm... One issue with the above could be old drives not working in a newer
machine. I guess some intermediate machine might help. Another way would
be to keep the destination drive in the destination machine and find some
way of writing to the disk over the network. This should be possible
with an old floppy-bootable Linux distro, I'm sure there are still
some suitable floppy images out there. Quite likely there are also old
floppy-bootable editions of BSD and Minix which could work just as well.


--
Ethan Grammatikidis

Those who are slower at parsing information must
necessarily be faster at problem-solving.

Re: [9fans] installation on SATYA disk failed

[Ethan Grammatikidis]

I forgot the obvious: Install a bootloader capable of booting CD-ROMs to a floppy.

--
Ethan Grammatikidis

Those who are slower at parsing information must
necessarily be faster at problem-solving.

Re: [9fans] installation on SATYA disk failed

[tlaronde]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 08:51:54PM +0100, Ethan Grammatikidis wrote:
> I forgot the obvious: Install a bootloader capable of booting CD-ROMs to a floppy.

This won't help if the BIOS doesn't support El Torito, since a
bootloader has generally no drivers (except for ethernet perhaps), and
since the bootloaders able to handle CDROM don't see the CDROM but what
is faked as a floppy (not only 3"1/2) or a hard drive (rare) by the
BIOS.

Hence, if the BIOS doesn't support El Torito, a bootloader only on a
floppy won't give access to the CDROM.

That's also why when you start wanting to extend capabilities of a
bootloader you realize, too late, that you are creating another
kernel... and it's simpler to use a stripped kernel as the main part of
the bootstrap machinery.
--
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                 http://www.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C

Re: [9fans] installation on SATA disk failed

[cej]

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Just a question: would it help if I had a SATA-DVD drive on sdE1 ? (And the target on sdE0, as it is now). Could I then install from the CD without fiddling? Perhaps, not more than editing plan9.ini?

Thanks, regards,
++pac.

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Re: [9fans] installation on SATYA disk failed

[Akshat Kumar]

Geoff,

Please do not kill the floppy install option.
I have a few computers that are not able to
boot from CD, but can do so from floppy.
I think the few people that do like to run Plan 9
natively, like myself, perhaps do so on older
computers where this is likely the case.


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