floppy boot on Pentium

floppy boot on Pentium

[Boyd]

    From:	sch@postman.ncube.com (Steve Hemminger)

    Booting directly from floppy (like the 1st disk of the 4 disk set)
    does not work on our Pentium PC's when they are running at full speed.
    
    It gets part way through the load and fails with "premature EOF"
    (fails at different point every time).

I had the same problem with just about all of our PC's here, until I
got it to go on a laptop.  So I thought:  bugger it, I'll just copy
it onto c: and make c: look enough like the floppy to boot it.
However I did stumble across the problem that DOS reckons 'aux'
is a device, like prn: or lpt1: -- gag.

Copy /bin/aux/* with plan9.

floppy boot on Pentium

[jmk]

I've applied the dma overrun fix to b.com, the boostrap programme.
A new image of disk1 is available via ftp, disk1.3.

When we were testing the distribution there was one system that consistently
gave truly appalling floppy performance and we could never pin down why, it
was an NCR Globalyst 600 with a P90. We have other 90MHz systems that give no
trouble.

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From:	sch@postman.ncube.com (Steve Hemminger)
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Subject: floppy boot on Pentium
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Booting directly from floppy (like the 1st disk of the 4 disk set)
does not work on our Pentium PC's when they are running at full speed.

It gets part way through the load and fails with "premature EOF"
(fails at different point every time).

It does work if:
	- turn off cache (in BIOS) 
	- or set clock rate to 25Mhz
	- or boot DOS then run b

Looks like the boot block program is not setting up something
related to the floppy controller (or has a silly spin loop).

-sch

floppy boot on Pentium

[Steve]

Booting directly from floppy (like the 1st disk of the 4 disk set)
does not work on our Pentium PC's when they are running at full speed.

It gets part way through the load and fails with "premature EOF"
(fails at different point every time).

It does work if:
	- turn off cache (in BIOS) 
	- or set clock rate to 25Mhz
	- or boot DOS then run b

Looks like the boot block program is not setting up something
related to the floppy controller (or has a silly spin loop).

-sch