Re: [9fans] plan9 iso image cont.

[Terry Wendt <silicon.penguin67@gmail.com>]

When I tried booting 9front, it didn't give me any options until it
got to the bootargs line, where it froze.
I'll get back to 9front later. I am interested, but my system is
completly borked right now.

When I had tried the vanilla plan9.iso, I was trying the "boot from
cd" option, and it was freezing right away.  So... I figured I had two
primary partitions unused, one of which I planned to install plan9 to
anyway, why not see if the "install to hard drive" option would work?
My everyday system is openSuSE 12.3 as such:

/dev/sda1 - fat16 - A fat partition containing Dell stuff.
/dev/sda2 - ext2 - Set aside for plan9.
/dev/sda3 - ext2 - Empty.
/dev/sda4 - The extended part.
/dev/sda5 - linux-swap
/dev/sda6 - ext3 - An old, unused distro, has a lot of backup files I
need to save.
/dev/sda7 - (was ext4) - '/' my system partition.
/dev/sda8 - (was ext4) - '/home'
/dev/sda9 - (was ext3) - '/music'
 - - - - - - -  89.35 GiB unallocated

You'll note the three partitions that say "was ext4" or "ext3"!!
Also, I was using grub2 as the boot loader.  You'll note again the use
of "was".

Prior to openSuSE 12.3, I'd never used grub2.  I can swear there is a
way to use grub2 to install a new system.  Grub2 was not installed to
the mbr, but actually on the extended part.  Maybe it actually uses
the mbr to point to it's location on the extended part, I'm not sure.
Also, the / and /home parts were/are ext4.

I figured, "what the heck" I'll try the install of plan9, and if it
whacks grub2, so be it.  I'll reinstall grub2, and all will be good.

The install to hard drive option seemed to work great.  Until I got to
the "mountdist" portion.  It didn't seem to want to use
/dev/sdD0/data.  I figured I'd point it at the plan9.iso image on
/dev/sda8/ partition.  Due to the unfamiliar naming scheme, I wasn't
positive which partition I wanted, so I tried LINUX4, LINUX5, and
LINUX6. The install program told me they were all empty.  No problem,
I thought, I'll go back to openSuSE and move a copy of plan9.iso to
/dev/sda3 and while I'm at it copy the contents out of the iso image
to /dev/sda3 as well.

Reboot.

No bootable partitions... uh oh.  Ok, no problem, I'll reinstall
grub2.  Two hours go by.  Can't figure out how to reinstall grub2.
Alright, guess I'll have to reinstall openSuSE.  Oh no!  The DVD is
slightly damaged, the so called rescue portion boots, but there are
about 50 errors trying to install... give up for the night.

This is great stuff, right? lol.

This morning I break out my trusty knoppix 5.3.1 dvd.  Boot up.
Connect to the net, and here I am.  Too bad knoppix 5.3.1 does not
speak ext4.  Darn.

So, my mission for today(or this weekend) is to recover the three
whacked partitions, recover grub2, then figure out the best way to
complete the plan9 install and get grub2 to play nice with plan9.

Also, I'd planned to add a cd drive to this mach, but I had forgotten
that it's sata and all the cd or dvd drives I have are ata.  Curses!
Foiled again!!

Terry.

On 6/28/13, Paul A. Patience <paul-a.patience@polymtl.ca> wrote:
> did you enable *acpi= when booting 9front?
> see the section Boot at [1].
>
> pap
>
> [1] http://code.google.com/p/plan9front/wiki/troubleshooting
>
>