[9fans] Install from hard drive - how?

[9fans] Install from hard drive - how?

[Steve Simon]

Hi,

I am still struggling trying to boot Plan9 on an NEC Versa SX Laptop.

I have a 3c809 PCMCIA Ether, vanilla PCMCIA modem, 128Mb ram, 6.4 Gb
disk,
CDROM OR LS120 disk

Initially I had problems booting from the LS120 - The PBS boot-strap
loader starts as it is read in by the BIOS, but then the system cannot
find a kernel presumably because it cannot access files on an LS120
It then prompts me for "Boot from:"

I worked around this by copying the floppy to a FAT partition on the
hard
disk - it appears that when 9load fails to read plan9.ini from the
floppy
it searches all other disks and thus finds my copy in the FAT partition.

9Load now finds plan9.ini but prompts me for "Boot From:" as it cannot
find the kernel which is still specified as living on the floppy in
plan9.ini. I can however type "sdC0!dos!9pcflop.gz" to load the kernel
from the hard disk.

The kernel then prompts me for "Load root from [local!/#S/sdC0/data]:".

If I accept this default (press return) the LS120 disk whirs for a few
seconds and then the system hangs, Ctrl-Alt-Del causes "Panic" so its
not
a complete hang but nothing more seems to happen, no rio, no VGA,
nothing.

I am _GUESSING_ that the 9pcflop.gz is trying to write the results of
its VGA probe VGA info to the LS120 disk and getting confused as it does
not understand LS120s.

I tried booting directly from the hard disk by unpackng the plan9
distribution, extracting LD.COM and putting this on the FAT partition.
My
idea was to remove the LS120 drive from the machine making it
to abort writing to the floppy rather than to hang waiting for it
(Guessing again).

LD.COM loads 9load ok, but it does not find plan9.ini. Explicitly
specifying
the kernel to load seems to work but aborts very quickly with somthing
like "start of kernel doesn't look right".

I am so frustrated as I bought the VERSA SX because it was one of the
Laptops known to work with P9r3, I assume all my problems are to do with
the damed LS120 disk (sigh).

The questions:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How do I boot using ld.com - what am I missing?

Am I right that the install floppy HAS to access the floppy drive and
this is what is cusing my problem?

Is there any way to work around this?

Thanks for any/all help

-Steve