From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: tlaronde@polynum.com
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2007 17:13:36 +0200
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] IBM X40 installation
Message-ID: <20070630151336.GA1185@polynum.com>
References: <20070630141138.GX3938@wasi.karlov.mff.cuni.cz>
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Hello,

On Sat, Jun 30, 2007 at 04:11:38PM +0200, Michal Hajek wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have some trouble installing plan9 on IBM Thinkpad X40.
>[..]
>
> Beforehand, I have already linux installed on that machine. That is,
> only linux (no windows).
>
> So far I succeeded to install plan9 in such a way, that I am able to
> boot from cd and than proceed to the plan9 system on the hdd.
>
> Now I would like to make plan9 bootable without any usb-cdrom.
>
> My idea is to use grub with
>
> rootnoverify (hd0,1)
> chainloader +1
> boot
>
> But unfortunately, this does not work. (the loader asked for floppy -
> which I cannot supply, since I do not have any floppy drive).

I dropped GRUB (and some development on GRUB) more than 5 years ago so
take this with caution (and I'm brand new to Plan 9).

When using the MBR the idea is to allocate a chunk of disk space to
different OSes and to let these ones behave alone, that is to let the
MBR that is a BIOS program with some data (the partition table) load the
first sector of each chunk belonging to the different OSes and let them
do their job.

GRUB, if its first stage is put as a MBR, doesn't use the partition
table to launch the active partition (to load the first sector of the
active partition) but loads itself.

This means that in this case, launching Plan 9 is done passing by an
intermediate step: GRUB, that complicates the matter if additional disks
(removable like USB) are present since this modifies the naming scheme
in GRUB.

So first, what is your disk layout (partition table)?

>
> So I booted from usb-cd, moved to plan9 system on the disk nad issued:
>
> %disk/format -b /386/pbslba /dev/sdC0/9fat

>>From the man page :

---quote
Format checks for a number of common mistakes; in particular, it will
refuse to format a 9fat partition unless r is specified with nresrv
larger than two.
---endquote

So it shall be hoped that indeed nothing was done or you have blanked
the 9fat table.

I hope this helps. But:

1) what is your partition table;
2) what option did you enter when installing (the installation script
handles this);
3) before installing, write down the partition table (starting sector,
chs values, and so on) since plan9 disk/fdisk may recompute some values
leading to problems---I have promised to give a look to it, but this is
not done at the moment.

Cheers,
--
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                 http://www.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C