[9fans] something evil happening when partitioning a hdd with the plan9 installer

[9fans] something evil happening when partitioning a hdd with the plan9 installer

[John Soros]

Hi all!
This is my first message, so please don't bash me too hard for my
ignorance!
I just got a shiny new dell inspiron 640m notebook. It has a core2duo
processor, 2 gigs of RAM and a 120gig hdd. The first thing I did, after
installing linux on it was to try plan9. I was amazed that the
installer actually started up on this brand new system, but eh, plan9
is a modern operating system, I guess ;)
The problem was that dell shipped that laptop with more than 12 gigs
reserved for the windows restore thing and other various stuff on 4
partitions, so I hardly had any primary partitions to use. My first try
was to install plan9 on a secondary partition (yes, rtfm!!!), which was
a very stupid thing to do, nevertheless the partition table got messed
with really bad. I mean, I could hardly recover my linux root partition
from the 6 partitions I had on the disk. The rest got wiped.
Okay, I thought, what a blunder, I wont miss that one again. So I wiped
my disk clean, and repartitioned now without all the dell partitions, so
I had my first partition reserved for plan9. I just got to the point of
installing plan9 on the machine again, so I loaded the plan9 cd in and
booted it (from april 4th 2007). I created the plan9 partition at the
beginning, where I reserved 3 gigs for it when reinstalling my system.
Okay, I thought, I got through the partitioning part with no problem, I
also subdivided my partition and mounted the fossil partition. Then I
thought I would check out what happened, and reboot my system into
linux. I know cfdisk is one of the most sensitive partitioning
tools, so I fired it up, and, to my joy, it spat an error message at
me. Actually, the same one as the one I got before.The error was
partition 4 extends past end of disk. I think partition 4 was my
extended partition, but I did not really see anything strange, I
checked the cylinders, but it looked like partition 4's end was the
last cylinder of the disk, so I didn't really understand, the same
thing happened before, when I installed it on an extended partition:
the partition table lloked fine, but cfdisk would complain, and my
system would get unbootable.
Sorry for the length of the message.
cheers!
John

Re: [9fans] something evil happening when partitioning a hdd with the plan9 installer

[Paweł Lasek]

On 4/9/07, John Soros <sorosj@gmail.com> wrote:

[cut]

In this case, I'd recommend repartitioning with plain linux fdisk and
reserve a partition for plan9 using it (Set partition type to plan9,
you can check the number using built-in help IIRC), then during plan9
installation just choose that partition and tell plan9 fdisk to don't
write anything.

And somebody ought to make plan9 bootable from something other than
primary partition (The same problem I have with Solaris 10. I could
use those 70 GB of hdd in my school computer, but there are not enough
primary partition numbers left for it's disklabel...)


-- 
Paul Lasek

Re: [9fans] something evil happening when partitioning a hdd with the plan9 installer

[John Soros]

Thanks, pavel.

On Mon, 9 Apr 2007 11:20:22 +0200
"Paweł Lasek" <pawel.lasek@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 4/9/07, John Soros <sorosj@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> [cut]
> 
> In this case, I'd recommend repartitioning with plain linux fdisk and
> reserve a partition for plan9 using it (Set partition type to plan9,
> you can check the number using built-in help IIRC), then during plan9
> installation just choose that partition and tell plan9 fdisk to don't
> write anything.
Yes, this definitely got me closer. I didn't know linux fdisk knew about plan9 type partitions.

> 
> And somebody ought to make plan9 bootable from something other than
> primary partition (The same problem I have with Solaris 10. I could
> use those 70 GB of hdd in my school computer, but there are not enough
> primary partition numbers left for it's disklabel...)
> 
> 

This got me a bit closer to having plan9 work on my system, as I succeded in installing it without having my partitions played with, but then came the bootsetup step. Here, the first time I simply pressed ctrl-d and rebooted the computer, but it seems that step has to be finished in order to get a 9fat partition set up with 9load, plan9.ini and the kernel, so I booted up the CD and quickly went through the bootsetup phase, selecting plan9 boot method, and selecting not to install into the mbr.

Here, when I rebooted, again, my partition table was wrong, the extended partition got messed with somehow, and reached 1 cylinder outside the phisical limit. Of course this did not make my system unbootable, but it's still queer though, that that last bootsetup phase, which shouldn't have messed with my partition table (I did not even install to the mbr), changed my extended partition.

Also, I still can not boot plan9 from grub for some odd reason. I tells me it can't bot the system.
Plan9 is on the /dev/sda1 partition, and here is how I am trying to boot it in grub:

root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
boot

I also tried putting rootnoverify instead of root, but it doesn't work either, and I also tried the makeactive option after root (hd0,0), but again, no avail.
Thanks for the replies!
Johnny

Re: [9fans] something evil happening when partitioning a hdd with the plan9 installer

[John Soros]

Okay, now plan9 is working on my laptop, here is how I did it:
I made a primary partition for plan9 in lunix, then I used fdisk to set the partition type to plan9
(this is the only partitioning program that know plan9 type partitions).

After this all went pretty easily, I installed the standard way from cdrom, I just didn't do any
partitioning as that was already done.

For the bootsetup step I selected plan9 way of booting, and at the question wether to install plan9
loader to the MBR I answered No.

Now I can boot plan9 on the primary partition #1 from grub like so:

title           Plan9 from outer space
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
boot

Thanks for all the replies, and all the suggestions.
Cheers to all plan9 users!
I there's any plan9 users in Hungary, I'd be very happy to meet them!
John


On Mon, 9 Apr 2007 11:20:22 +0200
"Paweł Lasek" <pawel.lasek@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 4/9/07, John Soros <sorosj@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> [cut]
> 
> In this case, I'd recommend repartitioning with plain linux fdisk and
> reserve a partition for plan9 using it (Set partition type to plan9,
> you can check the number using built-in help IIRC), then during plan9
> installation just choose that partition and tell plan9 fdisk to don't
> write anything.
> 
> And somebody ought to make plan9 bootable from something other than
> primary partition (The same problem I have with Solaris 10. I could
> use those 70 GB of hdd in my school computer, but there are not enough
> primary partition numbers left for it's disklabel...)
> 
> 

Re: [9fans] something evil happening when partitioning a hdd with the plan9 installer

[John Stalker]

> I made a primary partition for plan9 in lunix, then I used fdisk to set the=
>  partition type to plan9
> (this is the only partitioning program that know plan9 type partitions).

Not true

# uname -a
FreeBSD okapi.maths.tcd.ie 6.2-STABLE FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE #1: Mon Apr  9 00:24:39 IST 2007     root@okapi.maths.tcd.ie:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/USBDEBUG  i386
# grep plan9 /usr/src/sbin/fdisk/fdisk.c
	,{0x39, "plan9"}

-- 
John Stalker
School of Mathematics
Trinity College Dublin
tel +353 1 896 1983
fax +353 1 896 2282

Re: [9fans] something evil happening when partitioning a hdd with the plan9 installer

[W B Hacker]

John Soros wrote:
> Okay, now plan9 is working on my laptop, here is how I did it: I made a
> primary partition for plan9 in lunix, then I used fdisk to set the partition
> type to plan9 (this is the only partitioning program that know plan9 type
> partitions).

It may be the only one you have used that correctly reports them as Plan9, but 
it is by no means the only one that can create and manipulate a Plan9 partion.

All that FreeBSD's toolset needs is the correct decimal or hex partion type code 
to effect that. Not hard to then hack and re-assemble boot0 so that it then 
reports them correctly as 'Plan9' in the multi-boot choices.

> 
> After this all went pretty easily, I installed the standard way from cdrom, I
> just didn't do any partitioning as that was already done.
> 
> For the bootsetup step I selected plan9 way of booting, and at the question
> wether to install plan9 loader to the MBR I answered No.
> 
> Now I can boot plan9 on the primary partition #1 from grub like so:
> 
> title           Plan9 from outer space root (hd0,0) chainloader +1 boot
> 
> Thanks for all the replies, and all the suggestions. Cheers to all plan9
> users! I there's any plan9 users in Hungary, I'd be very happy to meet them! 
> John

boot0  - combined with the 'as issued' Plan9 '9fat' loading tools, does that 
reasonably well w/o grub or Lilo. The advantage is that it is less sensitive to 
whether the HDD in question is still in the same relative position as when first 
installed to (which ordinarily requires editing lilo.conf or grub's menu.lst).

Not ordinarily an issue with single-HDD laptops, but perhaps worht a look 
if/as/when Plan9 might have been installed to an external HDD.

> 
> 
> On Mon, 9 Apr 2007 11:20:22 +0200 "Paweł Lasek" <pawel.lasek@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> On 4/9/07, John Soros <sorosj@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> [cut]
>> 
>> In this case, I'd recommend repartitioning with plain linux fdisk and 
>> reserve a partition for plan9 using it (Set partition type to plan9, you
>> can check the number using built-in help IIRC), then during plan9 
>> installation just choose that partition and tell plan9 fdisk to don't write
>> anything.
>> 
>> And somebody ought to make plan9 bootable from something other than primary
>> partition (The same problem I have with Solaris 10. I could use those 70 GB
>> of hdd in my school computer, but there are not enough primary partition
>> numbers left for it's disklabel...)
>> 
>> 
> 

I have not yet attempted booting Plan9 from an 'extended' partition, but have 
been able to use block-mode loaders to start it from a 'primary' partition 
(slice) on a 200 GB HDD that was otherwise out of the reach of the BIOS (3 older 
MB tested, some with 1999 vintage BIOS).

It should be equally possible to start Plan9 from a non-primary partition - 
perhaps the real issue is not 'reaching' it, but whether it can understand where 
it is and finish the boot?

The FAT-within-Plan9-fs-type toolset Plan9 uses is still one of the most 
flexible ways of getting up and running.

It shouldn't take much to keep that approach compatible with progressively newer 
hardware and boot loaders.

Bill Hacker

Re: [9fans] something evil happening when partitioning a hdd with the plan9 installer

[John Stalker]

>> And somebody ought to make plan9 bootable from something other than primary
>> partition (The same problem I have with Solaris 10. I could use those 70 GB
>> of hdd in my school computer, but there are not enough primary partition
>> numbers left for it's disklabel...)
> 
> I have not yet attempted booting Plan9 from an 'extended' partition, but have
>  
> been able to use block-mode loaders to start it from a 'primary' partition 
> (slice) on a 200 GB HDD that was otherwise out of the reach of the BIOS (3 ol
> der 
> MB tested, some with 1999 vintage BIOS).
> 
> It should be equally possible to start Plan9 from a non-primary partition - 
> perhaps the real issue is not 'reaching' it, but whether it can understand
> where it is and finish the boot?

It can.  I run it from an extended partition.

-- 
John Stalker
School of Mathematics
Trinity College Dublin
tel +353 1 896 1983
fax +353 1 896 2282

Re: [9fans] something evil happening when partitioning a hdd with the plan9 installer

[John Stalker]

John,

Several things are odd about this.  I do in fact have plan9 installed
on an extended partition on a Dell laptop, so I know it can be done.
Here a few things to check:

  1) Do your BIOS, linux and plan9 all agree about the number of
  cylinders, heads and sectors on the disk?  I once had similar
  problems when NetBSD and FreeBSD saw different disk geometries.
  On reboot the disk appeared to have been wiped.  In fact,
  everything was still there, but the partition table in the
  MBR was messed up.

  2) Whose boot loader are you using?  Personally, I use GAG.  Noone
  ever seems to recommend it, but I've never had any problems.  It
  can boot from extended partitions or other disks.

  3) Is your disk IDE or SATA?  Plan9 still has problems with SATA
  sometimes.

John

> Hi all!
> This is my first message, so please don't bash me too hard for my
> ignorance!
> I just got a shiny new dell inspiron 640m notebook. It has a core2duo
> processor, 2 gigs of RAM and a 120gig hdd. The first thing I did, after
> installing linux on it was to try plan9. I was amazed that the
> installer actually started up on this brand new system, but eh, plan9
> is a modern operating system, I guess ;)
> The problem was that dell shipped that laptop with more than 12 gigs
> reserved for the windows restore thing and other various stuff on 4
> partitions, so I hardly had any primary partitions to use. My first try
> was to install plan9 on a secondary partition (yes, rtfm!!!), which was
> a very stupid thing to do, nevertheless the partition table got messed
> with really bad. I mean, I could hardly recover my linux root partition
> from the 6 partitions I had on the disk. The rest got wiped.
> Okay, I thought, what a blunder, I wont miss that one again. So I wiped
> my disk clean, and repartitioned now without all the dell partitions, so
> I had my first partition reserved for plan9. I just got to the point of
> installing plan9 on the machine again, so I loaded the plan9 cd in and
> booted it (from april 4th 2007). I created the plan9 partition at the
> beginning, where I reserved 3 gigs for it when reinstalling my system.
> Okay, I thought, I got through the partitioning part with no problem, I
> also subdivided my partition and mounted the fossil partition. Then I
> thought I would check out what happened, and reboot my system into
> linux. I know cfdisk is one of the most sensitive partitioning
> tools, so I fired it up, and, to my joy, it spat an error message at
> me. Actually, the same one as the one I got before.The error was
> partition 4 extends past end of disk. I think partition 4 was my
> extended partition, but I did not really see anything strange, I
> checked the cylinders, but it looked like partition 4's end was the
> last cylinder of the disk, so I didn't really understand, the same
> thing happened before, when I installed it on an extended partition:
> the partition table lloked fine, but cfdisk would complain, and my
> system would get unbootable.
> Sorry for the length of the message.
> cheers!
> John
-- 
John Stalker
School of Mathematics
Trinity College Dublin
tel +353 1 896 1983
fax +353 1 896 2282

Re: [9fans] something evil happening when partitioning a hdd with the plan9 installer

[matt]

I use http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/

It can trick the OS a bit

"
Swapping driver ID
Smart BootManager can boot most operating systems from not only the 
first hard disk but also others. If you have more than one hard disk in 
a computer and run different operating systems on each, this feature is 
very useful.
"

Another useful tool is the gparted linux boot disk

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

It can even resize existing partitions for certain partition types  (not 
BSD :(, not tried plan9)

Re: [9fans] something evil happening when partitioning a hdd with the plan9 installer

[John Stalker]

One more thought.  Perhaps your partition numbering is getting screwed
up.  Linux, and other UNIX clones, will get confused if you insert
new extended partitions, because you bump up the numbers of those that
follow.  Plan9 avoids this silliness for the most part, but has another
annoying habit.  If, for some reason, your partitions are out of order on
the disk, e.g. the third one is before the second, plan9 will "helpfully"
reorder them in the partition table in the MBR.  This isn't actually
wrong, but it can certainly be hard to diagnose the resulting problems
if you don't know that it is happening.

> Hi all!
> This is my first message, so please don't bash me too hard for my
> ignorance!
> I just got a shiny new dell inspiron 640m notebook. It has a core2duo
> processor, 2 gigs of RAM and a 120gig hdd. The first thing I did, after
> installing linux on it was to try plan9. I was amazed that the
> installer actually started up on this brand new system, but eh, plan9
> is a modern operating system, I guess ;)
> The problem was that dell shipped that laptop with more than 12 gigs
> reserved for the windows restore thing and other various stuff on 4
> partitions, so I hardly had any primary partitions to use. My first try
> was to install plan9 on a secondary partition (yes, rtfm!!!), which was
> a very stupid thing to do, nevertheless the partition table got messed
> with really bad. I mean, I could hardly recover my linux root partition
> from the 6 partitions I had on the disk. The rest got wiped.
> Okay, I thought, what a blunder, I wont miss that one again. So I wiped
> my disk clean, and repartitioned now without all the dell partitions, so
> I had my first partition reserved for plan9. I just got to the point of
> installing plan9 on the machine again, so I loaded the plan9 cd in and
> booted it (from april 4th 2007). I created the plan9 partition at the
> beginning, where I reserved 3 gigs for it when reinstalling my system.
> Okay, I thought, I got through the partitioning part with no problem, I
> also subdivided my partition and mounted the fossil partition. Then I
> thought I would check out what happened, and reboot my system into
> linux. I know cfdisk is one of the most sensitive partitioning
> tools, so I fired it up, and, to my joy, it spat an error message at
> me. Actually, the same one as the one I got before.The error was
> partition 4 extends past end of disk. I think partition 4 was my
> extended partition, but I did not really see anything strange, I
> checked the cylinders, but it looked like partition 4's end was the
> last cylinder of the disk, so I didn't really understand, the same
> thing happened before, when I installed it on an extended partition:
> the partition table lloked fine, but cfdisk would complain, and my
> system would get unbootable.
> Sorry for the length of the message.
> cheers!
> John
-- 
John Stalker
School of Mathematics
Trinity College Dublin
tel +353 1 896 1983
fax +353 1 896 2282

Re: Re: [9fans] something evil happening when partitioning a hdd with the plan9 installer

[Brian L.Stuart]

> Also, I still can not boot plan9 from grub for some odd reason. I tells me it can't bot the system.
> Plan9 is on the /dev/sda1 partition, and here is how I am trying to boot it in grub:
> 
> root (hd0,0)
> chainloader +1
> boot
> 
> I also tried putting rootnoverify instead of root, but it doesn't work either, and I also tried the makeactive option after root (hd0,0), but again, no avail.

That's pretty close to what I have.  Mine is installed on /dev/hda1 (the
second primary partition) and my grub entry looks like:

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

So in principal, if everything is set up correctly and you have the Plan 9
boot block at the beginning of the partition, it should work.  Is the
error coming from Plan 9 or from grub?

BLS

Re: [9fans] something evil happening when partitioning a hdd with the plan9 installer

[John Soros]

On Mon, 9 Apr 2007 15:07:52 -0500
Brian L.Stuart <blstuart@bellsouth.net> wrote:

> > Also, I still can not boot plan9 from grub for some odd reason. I tells me it can't bot the
> > system. Plan9 is on the /dev/sda1 partition, and here is how I am trying to boot it in grub:
> > 
> > root (hd0,0)
> > chainloader +1
> > boot
> > 
> > I also tried putting rootnoverify instead of root, but it doesn't work either, and I also tried
> > the makeactive option after root (hd0,0), but again, no avail.
> 
> That's pretty close to what I have.  Mine is installed on /dev/hda1 (the
> second primary partition) and my grub entry looks like:
> 
> title=Plan9
>   rootnoverify (hd0,1)
>   chainloader +1
> 
> So in principal, if everything is set up correctly and you have the Plan 9
> boot block at the beginning of the partition, it should work.  Is the
> error coming from Plan 9 or from grub?
> 
> BLS
> 
> 

Grub is complaining that it can't boot the partition. Howcome /dev/hda1 is the second partition on your system?
I think I'll try installing plan9 again, in a few days as right now I don't really have time to do so, this time going through the bootsetup phase. Maybe I'll even download a current iso.
Also, I see that you don't have a "boot" line in your grub config after chainloader, that might be the problem, I'll check without it.

Johnny