From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <200110011032.LAA21470@cthulhu.dircon.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <20010930131143.930C1199E7@mail.cse.psu.edu> from rob pike at "Sep 30, 2001 09:11:41 am" To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: Digby Tarvin MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: [9fans] A few installation queries... Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2001 11:32:57 +0100 Topicbox-Message-UUID: f7e565d6-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 I have just spent a couple of hours experimenting with the June 14 2001 Plan9 release, and while I havn't really spent enough time on it to say I am stuck, wanted to run a few funnies by the list before I forget about them to see if anyone has an explanation or similar experience... I created a boot floppy from the CD and on my main system it worked pretty much as expected, failing with an un-recognised video adapter. I then tried it in another box with an EPOX 8kTA3 1.1GHz AMD Athlon CPU, and I get: PBS...Plan 9 from Bell Labs apm ax=f000 cx=f000 dx=fdfa di=0 ebx=806c esi=-6c2dfc17 using fd0!dos!plan9.ini dev A0 port 1F0 config 0040 capabilities 2F00 mwdma 0007 udma 203F no such FAT partition fd0!dos Boot devices: fd0 fd1 sdC0 I didn't really expect it to work, as this box also had a relatively recent MATROX G400, but I am puzzled by the way that it failed, given that the FAT partition was found perfectly fine on the first PC... If any gurus out there could give a brief explanation of how to decode the information in the 'dev' line, that would be great. On systems that work, there seem to be two of these lines. I am wondering if the floppy driver is not working for some reason.. I then tried an older P100 machine with some even older ISA cards I dug up which seem to be in the supported hardware list. These were a CL-GD542x (Cirrus Logic) video adapter and an 8013EPC LAN board. I found an old 800Mb disk to install to, which had NT on the first 200MB partition and BSD Unix on the second 600MB partition The install went very smoothly. I removed the BSD partition and replaced it with a Plan9 partition, accepting most defaults, and then both added Plan9 to the NT boot menu as well as creating a boot floppy. After rebooting post install, and using the NT boot option, attempting to log in as 'glenda' gives me init: starting /bin/rc ndb/dns: can't read my ip address disk/fdisk: did not find master boot record i8042: fe returned to the ea command and the system hangs... When originally booting off the installation floppy, I saw the same i8042 message, but it then proceeded successfully to a graphical display.. If I log on as user 'none', there is no rio but I sucessfully get a shell prompt, so I assume there is some problem with the initialization of the display adapter. I compared the 'vgadb' on the hard disk and the updated install disk (where the graphics seemed to work) and they were identical... I tried booting direct from the Plan9 partition, which did not start at all. I assume that the install option to make the Plan9 partition active also causes the MBR to be written. Finally, I tried the boot floppy, and it behaved the same as the hard disk boot. Any thoughts? Regards, DigbyT -- Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt@acm.org http://www.cthulhu.dircon.co.uk