Re: [9fans] non-standard installs

[Martin C.Atkins <martin@mca-ltd.com>]

Hi,

On Wed, 20 Mar 2002 09:43:14 GMT Andrew <akm76@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> I'd really like to get some hands-on experience with Plan9,
> the thing that stops me is some hardware resource shortage...
> I got a linux box with some spare disk space, but no "unpartitioned" and
> it's not to be played with as it's used for everyday routine work.

	I'm sure I'm just unlucky, but given my (recent) experience
of installing Plan 9 for the first time, I'd stay well away from your
"production" machine, even if it did have a clean partition.

I found (repeatedly) that trying to put Plan 9 into a clean
secondary partition corrupted the size of the enclosing primary
partition. I was able to put it back, but thankfully the whole 40Gb
was brand new at the time, and so this wasn't necessary (except as a
vain attempt to keep the other partitions as the shop had left them).
Thus, I eventually scrapped the whole partition table, and put Plan 9
into a primary partition.
Since then it's all gone fine.....

I'm sorry, I wish it weren't true, since I'd like to have nothing
but good to say, but that's what happened.... and I thought I really
should warn you, incase you suddenly think "Oh - it should be safe,
I'll give it a try!".

Now if Plan 9 booted in VMware... Sigh.... (But many thanks to those
who tried to get it to work for me!)

Martin
PS
	as for the ancient machines... these look pretty big to me :-)

> I also got a pretty ancient 486sx with 40Mb ram, but <sigh> 150Mb disk. 
> (don't laugh please)
> If I read install instructions correctly I have to have 300Mb minimum to be 
> able to install.
> ...

-- 
Martin C. Atkins	martin@mca-ltd.com
Mission Critical Applications Ltd, U.K.