Plan9 Newcomer w/Q's about PC install

Plan9 Newcomer w/Q's about PC install

[Bryson]

Greetings all,

I ran across the ATT Labs Plan9 site the other day, and decided to try 
it out.  I downloaded the 4-disk mini-system, and have encountered some 
difficulties in attempting to install it on the two computers at my disposal.

The first machine I tried is a 386DX 20Mhz machine w/ a 387 and 8 MB 
RAM.  It has two IDE hard drives and a Diamond ET4000-based VGA card.  It 
has an empty 20MB partition on the first drive, which I wanted to use for 
Plan9.  However, when I try to bring up the system, either by booting 
from the first distribution disk or by a clean DOS boot followed by a:b, 
the system gets to the point where the installation screen is displayed 
with the choice to create the c:\plan9 directory or cancel.  The machine 
hangs, and I can neither move the selection hilight nor select either of 
the two options.

The other machine is a 486 DX2-66 with 16MB RAM, an Actix 928-based 
VLB video card and a single IDE drive.  I split my DOS partition and 
moved my Linux root partition to create a 25MB empty partition at the 
physical end of the drive.  The Plan9 distribution disk 1 booted fine, 
and installed the required software in c:\plan9.  After starting this 
system and selecting the option to install the remaining 3 disks, an 
error (number 23, I believe) is returned when the system tries to create 
the plan9 partition table, with the message that there is not enough disk 
space.

I've browsed through all the sites I've been able to find, looking for 
some info on these problems, but gotten no joy.  If any of the gurus out 
there can offer some insight, or pointers to more information, I'd be 
extremely grateful.  Thanks for your help!

Regards,

Bryson

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Plan9 Newcomer w/Q's about PC install

[Staffan]

Hello,

Well, I'm not a guru, but I was about where you were a few days ago,
and completing the installation has made me pick up a few things.

What do you mean by that you have an "empty" partition at the end of
the drive?  If you run fdisk, it should show "free space".  Plan 9
puts it's own partition table at the end of the drive, and has nothing
to do with the PC partitioning conventions.  I.e., it does not look at
the partitions you created with FDISK, it only looks for free space.
(Maybe this is the problem with your 486DX2?)

Staffan