Re: [9fans] installation on SATYA disk failed

[Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Sun, 26 Jul 2009 10:08:25 -0400
erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net> wrote:

> On Sun Jul 26 02:12:21 EDT 2009, bvalek2@gmail.com wrote:
> > I suggest that you keep the floppy-install option. If Plan 9 is
> > installed, its normally on a virtual machine, or on an older computer
> > somewhere in the garage, often with floppy-drives only. But if its
> > time consuming to support it...
>
> do you have such a machine?  (i have a pentium ii and a 386 dx,
> and both have cd rom drives)
>
> supposing you do, do you have one that doesn't have a pata port?
> cd rom drives are really cheep.  if you come to iwp9 i'll give you
> a few.

If I hadn't had to downsize I'd still have half a dozen machines incapable
of booting from CD-ROM, I vaguely recall CD-ROM boot being an unusual
feature at some point.

Having said that, if I had a machine which wouldn't boot from CD-ROM
I'd install in another machine and copy the installation to the target
drive. I've done it many times with Linux in the past, once or twice
with Windows 98 if I remember right, and the hardest part was usually
transfering the target drive between machines. Actually sometimes the
hardest part with Linux was that daft LILO bootloader, it was quite a
puzzle but a solvable one. I'm pretty sure 9load won't give quite the
same trouble, but it may need a bit of care to set up right.

Hmm... One issue with the above could be old drives not working in a newer
machine. I guess some intermediate machine might help. Another way would
be to keep the destination drive in the destination machine and find some
way of writing to the disk over the network. This should be possible
with an old floppy-bootable Linux distro, I'm sure there are still
some suitable floppy images out there. Quite likely there are also old
floppy-bootable editions of BSD and Minix which could work just as well.


--
Ethan Grammatikidis

Those who are slower at parsing information must
necessarily be faster at problem-solving.