From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Cc: david@loesje.nl Subject: Re: [9fans] Booting install without floppy? In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 20 Nov 2003 18:19:45 +0100." <20031120171945.GA607@wired> From: "Russ Cox" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-ID: <98601.1069347351.1@t40.swtch.com> Message-Id: Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 11:55:51 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8fd4ef72-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > Hi. Sorry, I'm not on the list, so if anyone can help me, it would be > great if they could CC me on the reply. > > I have never used plan 9 before, but I have read a bit, and alot of > it's design decisions appeal to me. I'm trying to install it on my > laptop (a Mitac 6120N). The problem is that the floppy drive stopped > working a long time ago, so I can't boot from floppy. Now, I burned a > plan 9 CD a while ago (from the plan9.iso.bz2 archive). I can boot up > from that. But, it can't find sdD0!cdboot, so it 9load can't find the > kernel or anything. I did some silly trick of copying the files from > bootdisk.img from the cd onto a new DOS partition, booting from CD and > telling it to load sdC0!dos!9pcflop.gz. That worked (couldn't find > plan9.ini though, so it asked me for mouse/vga/etc parameters. Maybe it did find plan9.ini -- the bootdisk.img on the CD is set up to prompt you for those parameters. > However, my problem seems to be that the graphics card in my laptop is > not in the vgadb. It has an ati mach64-based card ("ATI Technologies Inc > 3D Rage LT Pro AGP-133"). I just checked, and I found an identification > string in the aux/vga output: > > At 0xC00EB: MACH64LBPCIMTSGU > > This string I saw in the vgadb, but at a slightly different memory > location if I remember correctly. > > I'm wondering what's a decent way of booting without using floppies or > CDs, where I can edit the vgadb before, and start the install procedure? Assuming it did find plan9.ini, add a line bootfile=sdC0!dos!9pcflop.gz into the plan9.ini. Then it will figure out that the boot floppy is on sdC0!dos, and will use the vgadb there, if found. Russ