[9fans] installation procedure question

[9fans] installation procedure question

[Glenn Becker]

Hi -

I've cast longing looks at Plan9 from afar for some time. Recently 
purchased a CD/DVD burner and created a boot/install disc to play with, 
but am trying to proceed cautiously before installing ...

While searching for info on how to get this to work with the grub 
bootloader, I found this on a forum:

"As for installing it to a drive with other OSs and/or data. Do so with 
caution and understanding. Much like BSD and solaris, it messes with the 
drives partition table CHS/LBA values. Unlike some nux flavors that do 
this, it seems to affect all partitions, not just its own."

Cd anyone comment on this or, even better, suggest a way to avoid this 
happening if true? I am thinking of installing onto a Dell PIII laptop 
with 6 other OSs currently on it. I wanted to put Plan 9 on the final 
primary partition on the drive and continue to use Grub as a bootloader.

Also the "Installation instructions" on the wiki list four boot methods, 
none of which seem to apply ... should I simply not run bootsetup, then?

Thanks,

Glenn Becker

+-----------------------------------------------------+
Glenn Becker - burningc@sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
+-----------------------------------------------------+

Re: [9fans] installation procedure question

[Alberto Cortés]

Glenn Becker said:

> While searching for info on how to get this to work with the grub 
> bootloader...

I can't help you with grub, but you can avoid this problem if you
don't *need* a native plan9: install a plan9 on a QEMU, for
example, it is very easy.

You can even install a linux+grub *and* a plan9 on the QEMU and
play with the emulated grub until you learn how to use it safely.


-- 
Alberto Cortés

Re: [9fans] installation procedure question

[Brian L.Stuart]

> While searching for info on how to get this to work with the grub 
> bootloader, I found this on a forum:
>
> Cd anyone comment on this or, even better, suggest a way to avoid this 
> happening if true? I am thinking of installing onto a Dell PIII laptop 
> with 6 other OSs currently on it. I wanted to put Plan 9 on the final 
> primary partition on the drive and continue to use Grub as a bootloader.

I can't speak authoritatively, but I can relate how I installed
it on mine using grub.  The short answer is that I selected
the option that installs the boot loader in the partition's boot
block, rather than the disk's MBR.  Then I configured grub
to act much like you do for Windows.  The actual grub entry
I have looks like:

title=Plan9
  rootnoverify (hd0,1)
  chainloader +1

Now having said that, I must also say that I seem to always
end up doing something wrong along the way.  Almost every
time I do an install, I end up having to manually mess with
the DOS partition where the kernel and plan9.ini are kept.
But I've been able to successfully install it several times
without killing the other OSs on the machine.

One caveat:  It's been a while since I last did this, so my
memory of details may be a bit fuzzy.

BLS