[9fans] booting problem

[9fans] booting problem

[Mathieu L.]

Hi all,

I had been hearing about plan9 for a few months now (from the wmi
people) and I finally got the occasion to install it since I've just got
my hands on a few pieces of old hardware.
I booted with the iso and the whole installation went fine (except that
the distcopy stage took more than an hour since I believe there is no
DMA on that hd).
I chose "plan9" when asked what kind of booting process I wanted, and I
said "yes" when asked if I wanted the partition to be active.

Now my problem is that just after the bios stage, I just get some
random colored caracters all around the screen and it just hangs there.

Can anyone help with that?

Thanks in advance.
Mathieu.

--
"Monde de merde."
Georges Abitbol.
--

Re: [9fans] booting problem

[Russ Cox]

> Now my problem is that just after the bios stage, I just get some
> random colored caracters all around the screen and it just hangs there.
>
> Can anyone help with that?

Somehow your BIOS doesn't want to boot from the hard drive.
One alternative is to download the boot floppy image and boot it.
At the boot from prompt, type "sdC0!9fat!9pcf" (no quotes),
and at the root is from: prompt, type "local!#S/sdC0/fs" (again no quotes).
At the user prompt just hit enter to use glenda for now.

If that boots, then you can try re-installing the mbr.
At a prompt, run

	disk/mbr -m /386/mbr /dev/sdC0/data

at a prompt and then reboot without the floppy.  (You may
want to spend some time reading the various intro material
on the screen to familiarize yourself with the window system
first.)

Once you run disk/mbr and reboot, you should see
"MBR..." print out once the BIOS decides to boot from
your hard disk.  If it's not followed by "PBS..." then
you can run

	disk/format -b /386/pbs /dev/sdC0/9fat

to re-install the partition boot sector.  If that one doesn't
work you can try

	disk/format -b /386/pbslba /dev/sdC0/9fat

which uses a different BIOS call to access the disk.
(Most BIOSes support either, very old ones support only
the first, but maybe there are more recent ones that
support only the second.)

In the worst case, if none of this helps, you can create
a plan9.ini on the boot floppy with bootfile, bootargs,
mouseport, monitor, and vgasize lines and then just boot
from the floppy.  (I suppose in the very worst case even
the floppy won't help and you'll have to burn a special
boot CD, since we know your machine can boot CDs.)

Russ

Re: [9fans] booting problem

[Mathieu L.]

On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 01:11:25PM -0500, Russ Cox wrote:
> > Now my problem is that just after the bios stage, I just get some
> > random colored caracters all around the screen and it just hangs there.
> >
> > Can anyone help with that?
>
> Somehow your BIOS doesn't want to boot from the hard drive.
> One alternative is to download the boot floppy image and boot it.
> At the boot from prompt, type "sdC0!9fat!9pcf" (no quotes),

thx, but I can't even get passed that stage.
When I enter this, nothing happens, it's as if it didn't see my sdC0
drive. Actually just before this prompt is:
Boot devices: fd0
and that's all. Shouldn't sdC0 be listed here too?

Cheers,
Mathieu.

--
"Monde de merde."
Georges Abitbol.
--

Re: [9fans] booting problem

[Russ Cox]

> thx, but I can't even get passed that stage.
> When I enter this, nothing happens, it's as if it didn't see my sdC0
> drive. Actually just before this prompt is:
> Boot devices: fd0
> and that's all. Shouldn't sdC0 be listed here too?

Try copying /386/9pcf.gz from the CD image onto
the floppy and then boot from fd0!9pcf.gz.

Once you're in Plan 9, run

	pci | grep disk

and let us know what the output is.

Russ

Re: [9fans] booting problem

[Mathieu Lonjaret]

On 3/1/06, Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com> wrote:
> > thx, but I can't even get passed that stage.
> > When I enter this, nothing happens, it's as if it didn't see my sdC0
> > drive. Actually just before this prompt is:
> > Boot devices: fd0
> > and that's all. Shouldn't sdC0 be listed here too?
>
> Try copying /386/9pcf.gz from the CD image onto
> the floppy and then boot from fd0!9pcf.gz.

ok I copied that on another floppy because it wouldn't fit
all on the first one. I booted with the first one, when got the
prompt I inserted the second one and tried booting from
fd0!9pcf.gz, to which I got:
fd0!dos does not contain a FAT filesystem

Re: [9fans] Booting problem..

[Russ Cox]

you should be able to rename
c:\plan9\plan9ini.bak to c:\plan9\plan9.ini
and it will pick that one up instead of
sdC0!9fat!plan9.ini.  then you can do things
like change the bootfile= line back to the
terminal kernel from the install (sdC0!dos!plan9/9pcdisk).
that should get you up enough that you can
poke around -- perhaps the kernel on 9fat
got a bad block as a result of the crash?

[9fans] Booting problem..

[Ish Rattan]

I had a Plan9 cpu/terminal up and running for some time. After
the last power outage (today), it has problems booting:

PBS...Labs
uisng SdC0!9fat!plan9.ini
ether#0: NE2000: port 0x300 irq 10 addr 0x4000 size 0x4000: 004095E20415
panic: iunlok

hangs at this point.

The PC seems to work under DOS (hard disk, ether card etc. work).

Any pointers?
- ishwar