[9fans] Booting Plan9 standalone and in vmware

[9fans] Booting Plan9 standalone and in vmware

[Paul Lalonde]

I've been trying to get my Plan 9 installation to boot either from power 
on (I use grub as my boot loader, and the disk in question is on 
#S/sdD0, and that boots fine that way), or from vmware (where if I mount 
both disks, I get grub, select my plan 9 option, and it boots fine).  
The catch comes that most of the time my machine comes us as linux, and 
I want it to reboot that way automatically.  If I'm slow on the uptake 
in vmware, it tries to boot my linux partition and things go to hell in 
a handbasket. 

I'd like to set up my vmware machine to use my machine's /dev/hdc as 
#S/sdC0 so that I can use the mbr on that drive to get into plan9 
directly when using the vm.  Doing so, boot requests a root drive and 
user, then prints:
time...
fossil(#S/sdC0/fossil)...fsOpen: open /dev/sdD0/fossil: 
'/dev/sdD0/fossil does not exist'

etc, ending in a panic: boot process died: unknown.

Where is this reference to /dev/sdD0/fossil encoded?  In asking for the 
root it correctly prompts with [local!#S/sdC0/fossil], and I would 
expect to try opening that instead of sdD0.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
    Paul

Re: [9fans] Booting Plan9 standalone and in vmware

[Kenji Okamoto]

> I've been trying to get my Plan 9 installation to boot either from power 
> on (I use grub as my boot loader, 

I think grub is not compatible with Plan 9 loader when I tried it
before...   Only LILO can live with Plan 9.   Am I wrong?   Things
improved?

Kenji

Re: [9fans] Booting Plan9 standalone and in vmware

[Paul Lalonde]

I've had no problems with grub - it squeals a bit about the unrecognized 
partition,  but all of the grub script is
root (hd1, 0)
chainloader +1

My plan9 partition is on hd1, partition 0.

Paul


Kenji Okamoto wrote:

>>I've been trying to get my Plan 9 installation to boot either from power 
>>on (I use grub as my boot loader, 
>>    
>>
>
>I think grub is not compatible with Plan 9 loader when I tried it
>before...   Only LILO can live with Plan 9.   Am I wrong?   Things
>improved?
>
>Kenji
>
>
>  
>

Re: [9fans] Booting Plan9 standalone and in vmware

[andrey mirtchovski]

>> I've been trying to get my Plan 9 installation to boot either from power 
>> on (I use grub as my boot loader, 
> 
> I think grub is not compatible with Plan 9 loader when I tried it
> before...   Only LILO can live with Plan 9.   Am I wrong?   Things
> improved?
> 
> Kenji

i'm booting p9 with grub fine.  russ has posted instructions on how to
set it up in the past, i can repost my config.

andrey

Re: [9fans] Booting Plan9 standalone and in vmware

[blstuart]

In message <d659049fa9f962b5512e7a5d8d777029@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp>, Ken
ji Okamoto writes:
>I think grub is not compatible with Plan 9 loader when I tried it
>before...   Only LILO can live with Plan 9.   Am I wrong?   Things
>improved?

I've been using it quite happily.  My grub config for Plan9
is set up pretty much the same as for Windows and I've got
PBS set up in the first sector of the Plan9 partition.

BLS

Re: [9fans] Booting Plan9 standalone and in vmware

[boyd, rounin]

> I think grub is not compatible with Plan 9 loader when I tried it
> before... 

i got into grub hell a while back, so i resorted to BFI; i formatted the _whole_ disk.

VAIO re-installs are really easy and quick, so that compensated a bit for the grub woe.

Re: [9fans] Booting Plan9 standalone and in vmware

[Kenji Okamoto]

>> I think grub is not compatible with Plan 9 loader when I tried it
>> before... 

My experience was that I used no disk for Plan 9, and just for Linux
and tried to use grub on this situation.   Here, Plan 9 should be booted
from floppy, and Linux would be booted from disk.  After all, I gaved up
to use grub, and now I'm bootin Linux from floppy, too.   sigh...

What for Linux?
Because I'm using it to watch DVD movie.☺

Kenji

Re: [9fans] Booting Plan9 standalone and in vmware

[Paul Lalonde]

Thanks for the offer Andrey, but Takeshi found me a much simpler answer:
I built a small virtual disk with a MBR and 9fat system to act as 
ide0:0, and now it works perfectly.
I was overlooking the obvious :-)  I'll avoid doing the piles of config 
work, and do penance by putting together a trivial wiki page about it.

Thanks all,
    Paul

Re: [9fans] Booting Plan9 standalone and in vmware

[andrey mirtchovski]

you can use one of the older configurations files, /sys/src/9/pc/pcfl
which incorporate a shell and a script in the kernel.  it is much
trickier to configure and ends up with a massively bigger kernel, but
it gives you the ability to choose where to boot a fossil from
(essentially you decide what config file it boots with every time you
start up).

it may be more work than you're willing to do.  if you get stuck email
me privately and i'll give you sample configs.

andrey

> And so it is; and that means that my vmware/bare machine dual boot 
> scheme is doomed to failure ;-)
> Am I right in assuming that there's no hook for changing it in the boot 
> sequence?
> 
> Is there a better to do what I'm looking for? 
> 
> Thanks,
>     Paul
> 
> 
> YAMANASHI Takeshi wrote:
> 
>>Your fossil configuration branded into fossil partition
>>might contain sdD0 like:
>>% fossil/conf /dev/sdC0/fossil     (or any other fossil partition)
>>fsys main config /dev/sdD0/fossil
>>  
>>

Re: [9fans] Booting Plan9 standalone and in vmware

[Paul Lalonde]

And so it is; and that means that my vmware/bare machine dual boot 
scheme is doomed to failure ;-)
Am I right in assuming that there's no hook for changing it in the boot 
sequence?

Is there a better to do what I'm looking for? 

Thanks,
    Paul


YAMANASHI Takeshi wrote:

>Your fossil configuration branded into fossil partition
>might contain sdD0 like:
>% fossil/conf /dev/sdC0/fossil     (or any other fossil partition)
>fsys main config /dev/sdD0/fossil
>  
>

Re: [9fans] Booting Plan9 standalone and in vmware

[YAMANASHI Takeshi]

On Tue Nov  2 10:40:21 JST 2004, Paul Lalonde wrote:
> fossil(#S/sdC0/fossil)...fsOpen: open /dev/sdD0/fossil: 
> '/dev/sdD0/fossil does not exist'
 :
> Where is this reference to /dev/sdD0/fossil encoded?

Your fossil configuration branded into fossil partition
might contain sdD0 like:

% fossil/conf /dev/sdC0/fossil     (or any other fossil partition)
  :
fsys main config /dev/sdD0/fossil
  :

You might need to change the line and brand it to the partition
with fossil/conf -w again.
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