more advice for the lovelorn

more advice for the lovelorn

[jmk]

------ original message follows ------

>From jmk Sat Aug 19 23:59 EDT 1995
Path: alice!allegra!uhog.mit.edu!news.mathworks.com!newshost.marcam.com!usc!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!sunic!sunic.sunet.se!news.uni-c.dk!tkemi.klb.dtu.dk!jjw
From: jjw@tkemi.klb.dtu.dk (Joachim Wlodarz)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Help wanted, Plan9 a piece of junk!
Date: 18 Aug 1995 07:20:08 GMT
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Mike Kenney (mike@wavelet.apl.washington.edu) wrote:
: In article <40p6oe$q2t@paul.rutgers.edu>, Xiao Ke <xke@paul.rutgers.edu> wrote:
<DELETED>
: Jeez.  Doesn't anybody read installation notes anymore!  I was just checking
: out the Plan9 documentation the other day and it says plain as day that
: the Plan9 PC installation assumes you have DOS *only* on your disk and that
: it will overwrite the last 20Mb of your partition.  There is also a note
: in the "bugs" section concerning disks with multiple partitions.

: READ THE INSTALLATION NOTES CAREFULLY BEFORE INSTALLING *ANY* SOFTWARE!

: Now, with that off my chest ... Plan9 looks like a very interesting system.
: If I can scrounge up a spare PC I plan to give it a try.  Sure AT&T is
: charging $350.00 for the full distribution but the include the source for
: several architectures (i386, 68020, MIPS R4000, SPARC).


There is a fixed partitioning program, named prep, available from AT&T
(http://plan9.att.com/).  This version will try not to overwrite
everything except the primary DOS partition.  The old version of prep
(dated 95-05-19, size 22543) should be replaced with the new one
(95-07-19, 22526).  As the installation boot diskette is DOS formatted,
it's easy to do (in directory a:\386\bin\disk\).  It could be also done
right after the first stage of installation, when the content of boot
diskette has been transferred to the DOS partition, but BEFORE you boot
Plan9 again (in directory C:\plan9\386\bin\disk\).  I've tried it on my
machine and it works OK.

Plan9 is really a very interesting system.  It would be even more
interesting if a full PC distribution, including the sources, were
available for free :-)

The best thing to do before installing Plan9 is to check out how your HD
looks to Plan9, and especially to the prep program, which writes the
Plan9 partition table.

It's quite easy:  edit the file a:\rc\bin\cpurc and place a # at the
beginning of the last line in the file (#exec /bin/install) to prevent
the install program from loading.  As the Plan9 Rc shell doesn't like
CRLF-s, use an editor which do not introduce them (e.g. under Linux) or
convert the file appropriately, if must do that under DOS.

Then boot from this diskette.  When Plan9 prompts for password, simply
hit Enter.  Then, at the Rc shell prompt (a % sign), type

       disk/prep -r /dev/hd0disk   (or /dev/hd1disk)

It will display the contents of your MBR partition table (it's named DOS
partition table here) and the default Plan9 partition layout.  Check out
carefully the displayed partition tables for possible overlaps.  Keep in
mind that the Plan9 partition table resides on the LAST sector of the
harddrive, and is independent from the MBR partition table residing in
the FIRST physical sector.  The -r switch should prevent prep from
writing to the disk, but it will be always better not to play to much
with this program and exit by Ctrl-Alt-Del. Actually, the real damage is
not done by prep alone (it writes only the last sector), but by the kfs
and mkext programs, which generate the Plan9 filesystem and populate it
with files from the distribution set according to the Plan9 partition
table.

If everything looks fine, Plan9 should install without doing any damage
to the existing partitions.


Hope this helps,

-jjw.