Réf. : [9fans] Booting from HD in the absence of floppy?

Réf. : [9fans] Booting from HD in the absence of floppy?

[boyd.roberts]

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i got one too.  the problem is that you can do that, but it
looks for the nvram on the floppy and then it dies.  i think
i have a code fragment to get it to look on c:  i just haven't had
time to make up a new floppy.  i got a bit a work on at the mo.
why it just doesn't look on the bootdev (c:) is beyond me.
maybe a 'lack of foresight' --  philw :)



                                                                  
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Objet:    [9fans] Booting from HD in the absence of floppy?



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I'm trying to get the rabbit to come out and play,
on a sony vaio 505 (celeron). This looks like a reasonable
bet until the floppy has booted, then I get dumped at the
boot from: prompt, from where it proffers fd0 or sdC0.

The nuances with this beast are that the floppy drive is external
USB (yuk), so its capable of getting the bootstrap up and thence
it loses the plot somewhat as to where to go..

Is there any way of unpacking the 9gz onto the first partition
(FAT, win98) and the waving a wand to bring it up from the
boot from: prompt out of a fat partition?

many thanks for suggestions..

ams.


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[9fans] Re: Réf. : [9fans] Booting from HD in the absence of floppy?

[splite]

On Fri, Jul 21, 2000 at 11:13:02AM +0200, boyd.roberts@ca-indosuez.com wrote:
> 
> i got one too.  the problem is that you can do that, but it
> looks for the nvram on the floppy and then it dies.  i think
> i have a code fragment to get it to look on c:  i just haven't had
> time to make up a new floppy.  i got a bit a work on at the mo.
> why it just doesn't look on the bootdev (c:) is beyond me.
> maybe a 'lack of foresight' --  philw :)

Not a "lack of foresight", but a conscious design decision, it seems.
This is the comment from finddosfile() in src/9/boot/key.c:

/*
 *  return offset of first file block
 *
 *  This is a very simplistic dos file system.  It only
 *  works on floppies, only looks in the root, and only
 *  returns a pointer to the first block of a file.
 *
 *  This exists for cpu servers that have no hard disk
 *  or nvram to store the key on.
 *
 *  Please don't make this any smarter: it stays resident
 *  and I'ld prefer not to waste the space on something that
 *  runs only at boottime -- presotto.
 */

As the key isn't needed to do an initial install, it would be nice if key()
would just notify the user and press on if it can't find a key anywhere.

If I can ever get my computer stuff unpacked and set up (moving sucks), I'll
have a go at fixing that.