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* [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner
@ 2004-02-23  7:52 Geoff Collyer
  2004-02-23  7:00 ` boyd, rounin
                   ` (3 more replies)
  0 siblings, 4 replies; 20+ messages in thread
From: Geoff Collyer @ 2004-02-23  7:52 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

I've just booted my (Pentium Pro) terminal without using any rotating
disk.

I bought a compact-flash-to-IDE converter from PC Engine.  It's called
the CFDISK.5D and I got mine from http://store.ituner.com/ituner (in
Fremont, CA) for US$20.  Look under `CF IDE Adapters'.  There are
other variations and you might want to buy one of them instead if
there isn't room to insert the CFDISK.5D directly into an IDE
controller slot on your motherboard.

For booting Plan 9, you can use the smallest compact flash card you
can find (I had a 4MB and a 10MB lying around, but the smallest you
can buy new seems to be 32MB).  Currently you can buy 16MB Sandisk
cards for US$10.50 at http://www.stores.ebay.com/fcoelectronics.

The example of setting up a disk in prep(8) almost works but you only
want the 9fat, and prep expects 9fat to be exactly 10MB (leaving no
room on a 10MB card for boot blocks, etc.).  I ran prep by hand to set
up a slightly smaller 9fat on my 10MB card.

The CFDISK.5D (but perhaps not some of the variants) requires a 4-pin
floppy power cable and many machines provide only one (and you'll need
that to boot until you populate your compact flash card).  I got those
at CompUSA for US$13.

Make a plan9 boot floppy per the example in prep(8).  Copy your
machine's plan9.ini (and nvram in plan9.nvr if it has one) somewhere
handy, like /tmp.

Once you've gathered all those parts, turn off your machine (at the
power supply if possible), insert the compact flash card into the
CFDISK.5D or relative (it slides in easily), connect the floppy power
cable to a free power connector inside the PC and the other end to the
CFDISK.5D at the floppy-style power connector.  Insert the CFDISK.5D
into the first free IDE connector on your motherboard (I had to use
the second one due to short-sighted physical design of my machine).
It's keyed so you can't insert it wrong-way-round.  At this point your
machine probably won't boot off your existing disks nor your
(uninitialised) compact flash, so insert the boot floppy and turn the
machine on.  When it comes up, format the compact flash per the
example in prep(8), modulo the possible need to partition it by hand.
You should now be able to remove the boot floppy (and any other disks
you no longer need) and reboot.  The machine should come up by booting
from the compact flash (mine did, first time).

So that's US$43.50 per machine, plus shipping, but it won't wear out
from being read (like a floppy) and is utterly quiet (unlike a regular
disk).  It seems like just the thing to make sure that your main file
server and CPU server boot unattended.


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 20+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2004-02-24 11:08 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 20+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2004-02-23  7:52 [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner Geoff Collyer
2004-02-23  7:00 ` boyd, rounin
2004-02-23  9:11   ` Charles Forsyth
2004-02-23  9:23     ` Richard Miller
2004-02-23  9:30       ` Charles Forsyth
2004-02-23 15:03     ` Jim Choate
2004-02-23 10:18 ` matt
2004-02-23 10:27   ` Matthias Teege
2004-02-23 16:14 ` andrey mirtchovski
2004-02-23 18:17   ` ron minnich
2004-02-23 18:43     ` andrey mirtchovski
2004-02-23 19:36       ` ron minnich
2004-02-24  0:19     ` matt
2004-02-24  0:28       ` ron minnich
2004-02-24  1:39         ` matt
2004-02-24  1:43           ` ron minnich
2004-02-24 11:08             ` matt
2004-02-24  1:59 ` Kenji Okamoto
2004-02-24  3:40   ` Geoff Collyer
2004-02-24  3:58     ` Kenji Okamoto

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