Re: [9fans] problem with installing plan9 from USB disk image

["Ethan Gardener" <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Fri, Mar 26, 2021, at 7:53 AM, saif.resun@outlook.com <mailto:saif.resun%40outlook.com> wrote:
> I've uncompressed .bz2 but the problem is burning the .ISO file.

Following my guess at what's wrong:
You need to burn it as an image not a file. I think the default for most burners is to make a filesystem on the CD & put foo.iso into that filesystem as a file. How to do it will vary, but I'm pretty sure all burning software will have the option. If you've done it right, when you open the disk in Windows it should look have the same folders and files as the iso image. You'll see folders named 386 mips [other CPU names] mnt n bin dev sys lib adm cfg ...

Alternative #1:
If you can give a virtual machine access to a hard disk, you can use the virtual machine to install. You'd have to be careful not to harm Windows, but you would anyway. But if the iso won't boot when burned properly, I guess the installed system won't boot either.

Alternative #2:
Install 9front instead. Their iso image is USB-bootable. (You'll need to write the image to the raw device; not sure what tool but I think they document some.) It's almost the same as Plan 9, having some different fixes, some different drivers, and some other minor tweaks. (There's some work going on to share the changes as patches.) The biggest difference is 9front's website and documentation have... uh... a distinct flavour. ;) http://9front.org/

Huh.. 9front describe an alternative USB install process you might want to try if you can't get the others working. It's point 2 here:
http://fqa.9front.org/fqa4.html#4.2.2
For Plan 9, replace 9boot with 9load. You'll need to type the image name during boot as something like `sdC0!dos!9front.iso`. The letter C may be different. However, I'm not sure 9load has the necessary USB drivers. If it calls the BIOS, you'll be fine if your BIOS supports the right emulation; many do. (As a sort-of example: I have one laptop which emulates a USB floppy drive as a real floppy drive. It's great for old OSs which use the BIOS, but not so much for OSs which access the hardware directly.)

------------------------------------------
9fans: 9fans
Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T4a54d17e4c0f6c20-Md4324036853aba9a109175aa
Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription