Re: [9fans] something evil happening when partitioning a hdd with the plan9 installer

[W B Hacker <wbh@conducive.org>]

John Soros wrote:
> Okay, now plan9 is working on my laptop, here is how I did it: I made a
> primary partition for plan9 in lunix, then I used fdisk to set the partition
> type to plan9 (this is the only partitioning program that know plan9 type
> partitions).

It may be the only one you have used that correctly reports them as Plan9, but 
it is by no means the only one that can create and manipulate a Plan9 partion.

All that FreeBSD's toolset needs is the correct decimal or hex partion type code 
to effect that. Not hard to then hack and re-assemble boot0 so that it then 
reports them correctly as 'Plan9' in the multi-boot choices.

> 
> After this all went pretty easily, I installed the standard way from cdrom, I
> just didn't do any partitioning as that was already done.
> 
> For the bootsetup step I selected plan9 way of booting, and at the question
> wether to install plan9 loader to the MBR I answered No.
> 
> Now I can boot plan9 on the primary partition #1 from grub like so:
> 
> title           Plan9 from outer space root (hd0,0) chainloader +1 boot
> 
> Thanks for all the replies, and all the suggestions. Cheers to all plan9
> users! I there's any plan9 users in Hungary, I'd be very happy to meet them! 
> John

boot0  - combined with the 'as issued' Plan9 '9fat' loading tools, does that 
reasonably well w/o grub or Lilo. The advantage is that it is less sensitive to 
whether the HDD in question is still in the same relative position as when first 
installed to (which ordinarily requires editing lilo.conf or grub's menu.lst).

Not ordinarily an issue with single-HDD laptops, but perhaps worht a look 
if/as/when Plan9 might have been installed to an external HDD.

> 
> 
> On Mon, 9 Apr 2007 11:20:22 +0200 "Paweł Lasek" <pawel.lasek@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> On 4/9/07, John Soros <sorosj@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> [cut]
>> 
>> In this case, I'd recommend repartitioning with plain linux fdisk and 
>> reserve a partition for plan9 using it (Set partition type to plan9, you
>> can check the number using built-in help IIRC), then during plan9 
>> installation just choose that partition and tell plan9 fdisk to don't write
>> anything.
>> 
>> And somebody ought to make plan9 bootable from something other than primary
>> partition (The same problem I have with Solaris 10. I could use those 70 GB
>> of hdd in my school computer, but there are not enough primary partition
>> numbers left for it's disklabel...)
>> 
>> 
> 

I have not yet attempted booting Plan9 from an 'extended' partition, but have 
been able to use block-mode loaders to start it from a 'primary' partition 
(slice) on a 200 GB HDD that was otherwise out of the reach of the BIOS (3 older 
MB tested, some with 1999 vintage BIOS).

It should be equally possible to start Plan9 from a non-primary partition - 
perhaps the real issue is not 'reaching' it, but whether it can understand where 
it is and finish the boot?

The FAT-within-Plan9-fs-type toolset Plan9 uses is still one of the most 
flexible ways of getting up and running.

It shouldn't take much to keep that approach compatible with progressively newer 
hardware and boot loaders.

Bill Hacker