[9fans] Re: booting plan 9 from LILO (was matrox ...)

[9fans] Re: booting plan 9 from LILO (was matrox ...)

[pcky]

The 9load(8) manual page describes some limitations of the bootstrap.
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/8/9load

On my old AMI BIOS Pentium Pro system, I generally need to have my OS partitions starting within 2GB of the disk (this contradicts the 8.5GB figure in the man page). Only BeOS seems to willing to reside beyond that point.

>Since you say so, I redid the installation on a partition on the
>primary master (/dev/hda2 on linux). And I also configured
>lilo accordingly. Now I get the following:
>
>PBS ... Bad format or I/O error
>Press a key to reboot...
>
>And I get stuck again.
>Any ideas ?
>
>Jatin

Re: [9fans] Re: booting plan 9 from LILO (was matrox ...)

[Russ Cox]

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If your BIOS only supports C/H/S mode then you only get
10/8/6-bits for each, meaning you can't go more than 2^24
sectors = 8.5GB into the disk.

Newer BIOSes support LBA mode where you just tell it the
linear sector number, so you get 2^32 sectors = 2TB into
the disk.

If your BIOS doesn't do LBA mode then there's no way
to get at sectors more than 8.5GB into the disk.
When this is the case, both the Plan 9 MBR and the
Plan 9 PBS correctly address sectors up to that point.

Many older commercial (cough, Microsoft, cough) MBRs
weren't careful about structuring some addressing calculation
(the details of which I've thankfully forgotten) so as
to avoid overflow, with the net result that they couldn't
access sectors past 2GB into the disk.

Russ

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From: "pcky" <pcky@buzzle.com>
To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: [9fans] Re: booting plan 9 from LILO (was matrox ...)
Date: Mon,  6 May 2002 21:43:19 -0400
Message-ID: <200205062143.AA252379448@buzzle.com>

The 9load(8) manual page describes some limitations of the bootstrap.
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/8/9load

On my old AMI BIOS Pentium Pro system, I generally need to have my OS partitions starting within 2GB of the disk (this contradicts the 8.5GB figure in the man page). Only BeOS seems to willing to reside beyond that point.

>Since you say so, I redid the installation on a partition on the
>primary master (/dev/hda2 on linux). And I also configured
>lilo accordingly. Now I get the following:
>
>PBS ... Bad format or I/O error
>Press a key to reboot...
>
>And I get stuck again.
>Any ideas ?
>
>Jatin