Adding pcdist to CD-ROM file system?

[Luther Huffman lutherh@mail.infinet.com]

> From:          "jim mckie " <jmk@plan9.att.com>

> Could you elaborate on what the ATAPI problems were and how you fixed them?
> It's the season's hot topic.

Oh, hell! I knew someone was going to ask that question. =;-) Well, 
the problem I was having was that the Plan 9 installer simply wasn't 
seeing that I had an ATAPI drive attached (On secondary IDE 
controller, IRQ 15, IO at 0170). Today I got the installer to find 
it. I would love to say that I cracked this problem with the brute 
force of my intellect, but the truth is I'm not sure how I did it! 
   It was either one (or both [or neither!]) of two things I tried:
1. I found that the jumper on the CD-ROM drive was set to slave by 
the PC manufacturer even though it was the only drive attached to its 
controller. Being set as a slave has never affected how it operated 
under Windows or Windows 95. I suspect this is because Microsoft is 
used to thinking of *everything* as its slave. I changed the jumper 
to set the CD-ROM as master.

2. I originally had this line in plan9.ini:
ata1=irq=15

I now have these two lines:
ata1=irq=15
ata2=irq=15

I know it looks crazy but *something* worked! I think it's kind of 
like using SCSI on the Mac. Logic tells you to put the SCSI 
terminator on the last device in the chain but sometimes it needs to 
be placed elsewhere in the chain. I try not to rationalize it. I just 
do it!.
 
> The safest way to install the updates is to get the source updates from
> plan9.att.com and compile and install.

Thanks. I found them. I'll try to install them. As I understand it, I 
start the self-extraction by typing:
rc patchname.rc
I should get a slew of diff files and (perhaps?) a mk file to oversee 
everything, right?

Thanks to everyone,
Luther Huffman, Jr.