second try

second try

[Brian]

Ok, so I tried on a different drive this morning and eventually got it to
work. The following information may or may not be useful:

I installed it on my notebook, which has a 340MB disk, 16MB RAM, and an
i486dx4/100. Linux was installed on this machine, but there was a 32MB
swap partition, so I had the bright idea to install the DOS and plan 9
partitions over that. I used one of my other linux boxen to prepare the
floppy (had to replace the "prep" command on it), and proceeded. You don't
need to have much of DOS at all on the disk; all you have to do is:

 - boot with 1st ms-dos disk and exit the setup program as soon as it starts
 - "fdisk" and make a tiny DOS partition (I used 4MB but it could be
    smaller, I'm sure)
 - computer will reboot when you exit fdisk (stupid hardware, stupid software)
 - do step 1 again (wince harder this time)
 - "format c: /s"
 - if you have linux installed on the disk, you need to do an fdisk /mbr
     (please see linux notes below!)
 - replace DOS trash-disk with plan 9 boot disk and type "b".

Here's where I ran into trouble. The place on the disk I was planning to
install plan 9 was in between my / and /usr linux partitions. The plan 9
boot disk booted and seemingly took the first partition on the disk (my /) 
to be the DOS partition and when I told it to install the plan 9 DOS files,
it waltzed right over that. I suspected this when I rebooted and there was
no plan9 directory on the DOS partition. I knew it when I tried to boot
linux from floppy. So we now know that plan 9's install doesn't seem to
know the right way to find the "primary DOS partition."

The moral of this story is to back up everything on the disk beforehand even
if it is on another partition, because plan 9 will zing it ruthlessly --
even though I installed using the "fixed" prep command, it still went ahead
and zapped my /usr partition. I have a feeling that the fix was for
multiple partitions directly after the DOS trash (which seemingly has to be
the first on the disk) and not anything that may be after where you intend
to put plan 9. I'll try to confirm this later.

Ok, so now after / was gone, I just went ahead and put the DOS partition at
the beginning of the disk (as I described above) and went ahead with the
install. ("C'mon Bullwinkle.. that trick NEVER works.." "This time for
sure, Rocky!") Ok, this time it did work. However:

I couldn't get it to recognize the built-in PS/2 trackball or a serial Mouse
Systems mouse. Finally, I grudgingly pulled the Logitech MouseMan out of
my other Linux box, and that did work. I suppose I have to buy another
MouseMan, anyway (they cost $65 here, you know.). It didn't do 640x480x8
vga right, but it does do monochrome ok, as it should. I'm not surprised by
this because my notebook has a Cirrus 6440 chipset and that's still kind of a
rare beast (although XFree86 3.1.1 supports it). All of this fiddling
around meant a lot of rebooting and changing the plan9.ini file (through
the plan 9 install program, probably a silly thing to do). When booting the
install program, the kernel correctly says that I have a 2-slotted intel
xxxxx PCMCIA chipset in the notebook, but when I put in my 3Com 3C589 and
configure it in, it screws up and identifies it as a 1-slot Cirrus Logic
controller. Oh well, I'll see about it later.

It's really cool. In particular, acme feels great and is extremely
well-done. I can't find my break key (tried plokta) - don't know if this is
due to the smaller notebook keyboard or what. Anyway, it's an excellent
job, but I'd definitely recommend getting another hard disk before
installing.