Plan 9 hangs during install

[Will Rose cwr@crash.cts.com]

Josh Purinton (joshp@spirit-lake.k12.ia.US) wrote:
: Hello fellow Plan 9 fans,

: I'm trying to install the 4-disk demo of Plan 9 on a 386/25
: with 8MB RAM/400MB HD here in the high school PC lab.  I am using
: the files 'disk1' and 'disk{2-4}.vd' obtained today from plan9.att.com.

: I boot from disk 1, and it gets to a screen with 'System Installation
: & Configuration' in the menu bar.  There is a box that says 'System
: Installation will create a new directory C:\plan9 and copy about 1.44
: Mbytes onto the C: drive' and below that a box with 'Proceed Abort'
: in it, and 'Proceed' is highlighted.

: The system hangs here.  No key has any effect, including tab, the
: arrow keys, and ctrl-alt-del.  There is no mouse cursor.

: I have tried booting from disk 1, and also booting from a minimal dos
: diskette and then putting in disk 1 and typing b:a.  Nothing seems to
: work.

Really dumb answer - I suppose you still have an MSDOS partition
at the start of the HD with ~2MB free?

Slightly less dumb answer - try ripping out every card you don't
need (like ethernet) and putting the mouse on com1, and make sure
that there is only one partition on the HD, and that is the MSDOS
partition at the start of the drive.

The 4 disk set installed with no particular problems for me, but I
was using standard hardware, in particular an Adaptec 1542 SCSI
controller.  I don't know what other controllers plan9 accepts,
tho' I thought it would take standard IDE.

Will
cwr@crash.cts.com