[9fans] Booting install without floppy?

["David S. Geirsson" <david@loesje.nl>]

Hi. Sorry, I'm not on the list, so if anyone can help me, it would be
great if they could CC me on the reply.

I have never used plan 9 before, but I have read a bit, and alot of
it's design decisions appeal to me. I'm trying to install it on my
laptop (a Mitac 6120N). The problem is that the floppy drive stopped
working a long time ago, so I can't boot from floppy. Now, I burned a
plan 9 CD a while ago (from the plan9.iso.bz2 archive). I can boot up
from that. But, it can't find sdD0!cdboot, so it 9load can't find the
kernel or anything. I did some silly trick of copying the files from
bootdisk.img from the cd onto a new DOS partition, booting from CD and
telling it to load sdC0!dos!9pcflop.gz. That worked (couldn't find
plan9.ini though, so it asked me for mouse/vga/etc parameters.
However, my problem seems to be that the graphics card in my laptop is
not in the vgadb. It has an ati mach64-based card ("ATI Technologies Inc
3D Rage LT Pro AGP-133"). I just checked, and I found an identification
string in the aux/vga output:

At 0xC00EB: MACH64LBPCIMTSGU

This string I saw in the vgadb, but at a slightly different memory
location if I remember correctly.

I'm wondering what's a decent way of booting without using floppies or
CDs, where I can edit the vgadb before, and start the install procedure?

Thanks.

--
David S. Geirsson
david@loesje.nl
+31 642561928 (0642561928)