Re: [9fans] bootable cd images

[forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk]

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All the CD images that i've seen have been bootable by the BIOS, but the earlier
ones lacked some support in 9load (and 9loadlite) for getting the
plan9.ini from the cdboot partition, and offering the CD as a plan9
second stage boot device.

Certainly the log you showed here is just what you get in that case.

The boot images i fetched from the download for several days
after russ announced it suffered the same problem.  After burning
a CD from one of those, and finding it still failed, i checked the bootdisk.img in the image and
it seemed to be old.  The file's mtime was still 2nd may,
and strings(1) on the 9load within bootdisk.img
showed too few instances of the string
`cdboot' to be the new version.

Late last night and overnight I set about building a revised version
for the master of the Vitanuova Plan 9 CD, using a bootdisk.img that I changed myself,
with 9load and the kernels built by me yesterday (thus having
the right support).  That didn't work either, but only because,
as I eventually discovered today, I'd somehow managed to update 9pccd.gz and
9pcflop.gz in bootdisk.img but the new 9load hadn't been copied
even though I was certain I had copied it.  That CD when booted
produced, once again, similar results to the log you sent to the list.
Several hours ago, I built a new VN CD image AGAIN and THIS
time I made sure I copied the updated 9load (or 9loadlite).

Success.  It boots, finds the plan9.ini in the cdboot
partition on the CD, and offers to run or install from the CD;
and both options work (on a Thinkpad 600 I had to test).

I thus suspect that for one reason or another the bootdisk.img in
the downloadable CD image still has got the old 9load,
or hadn't got it until recently if it has changed recently.
If I have time shortly I'll try downloading it again to check.

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To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] bootable cd images
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 15:56:50 GMT
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0206201706440.25571-100000@bugs.pouce.org>

Hello,

i'm new to plan9, i just installed it yesterday on my old k6II.

Although i could boot from the cd, i still needed a floppy disk to launch
the installation...

This is what i get after booting from the cd :
(setup : 1 ide hd as master, cdrom as slave)
--------------------------------------------
(sniped...)
found partion sdC1!cdboot; 34164+1440
Boot devices: fd0
boot from:
--------------------------------------------

Weird... no sdC1 suggested ?


I tried to issue this :
--------------------------------------------
boot from: sdC1!cdboot!plan9.ini
--------------------------------------------

I got:

--------------------------------------------
found PLAN9     .INI attr 0x0 start 0x723 len 327
.bad kernel format
--------------------------------------------

Though I managed to boot/install from the cd with a boot disk already in
fd0... (what's the point ?...)

May be I encountered this problem because, as i'm new to plan9, I missed
something, may be I issued the wrong command... Or just simply I
misunderstood something...
Probably the latter because when i issued (booting from cd, and inserting
floppy at prompt before issuing the command) :
--------------------------------------------
boot from: fd0!dos!plan9.ini
--------------------------------------------

i get something similar :
--------------------------------------------
found PLAN9    .INI attr 0x0 start 0x9e1 len 512
.bad kernel format
--------------------------------------------


But I eventually managed to install plan9 with not much problem, the
documentation/menu is clear.

(PS: i also had to put my cdrom on the same cable as my ide hd to get my
cdrom recognized...but this is another problem.)

Cheers,
JCC.

On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, Russ Cox wrote:

> the current plan 9 cd image (installed
> an hour or two ago) is bootable.  a menu
> asks whether you want to boot the equivalent
> of the install floppy or simply to boot plan 9
> using the cd as the root file system.
>
> booting entirely off cd works just fine.
>
> i haven't tried doing an install from it,
> but it's the same kernel that the install
> disk uses, so i expect it to work (famous
> last words).
>
> thanks to forsyth and jmk for figuring out
> the hard parts.
>
> russ