rsharpe@flinders.cs.flinders.oz (Richard Sharpe) (10/14/88)
Well folks, Following up my previous postings on this subject, I now have A/UX running on my Rodime 80 MB drive. Here is how I managed it: 1. Got hold of the Apple 80SC drive with A/UX on it (My version is A/UX 1.0b10) 2. Sorted out the licencing issues with Apple about running it on multiple machines (Well not actually, as we are only running it one one machine). 3. Boot A/UX off the 80SC. 4. Locate the Rodime device driver, move it to temporary storage in the file system. I used dd and /dev/dsk/cXd0s31 where X is the SCSI id of the Rodime drive (0) since it is the internal drive. Patch the driver map in block 0 of the drive as well. Adb(1) did that for me. 5. Partition the Rodime using dp(1M). I partitioned it up the same as the Apple 80SC, except that there was one more partition, number 8, which soaked up all the spare space between the end of partition 7 and the dummy 2 block partition on the end of the drive. Make sure that you get the BZB initialized correctly for each Unix related partition. Eg, Swap File System, Critical, etc. 6. Copy the device driver into the partition meant for device drivers. This step appears necessary so that MacOS (We will get to that) doesn't barf when it tries to initialize the drive. 7. use dd(1) to copy each partition from the Apple 80SC, except for the partition map, the driver partition and the Apple_Free partition (also ignore the dummy partition at the end. I had to actually copy the "A/UX Root" partition several times before it would copy the entire thing. 8. Make a file system on the extra partition (number 8). Do this in the following way: pname -a -c X -s 8 -t "Apple_UNIX_SVR2" "A/UX Extra" It should respond with cXd0S8, and then you can reference this partition as /dev/dsk/cXd0s8 (In fact, you will need to do similar sorts of things in step 7 above so that you can copy from the 80SC to the partitions on the Rodime, as you will have to associate a device special file with a partition on the drive). Then use mkfs. Ok, so what. The next problem is that the Mac will not boot that MacOS partition that has SASH on it, and you cannot get the MacOS to recognize the Rodime even though it has booted from another drive. However, you can get A/UX to boot from the Rodime, so here is what you do: 9. Make up a 800K floppy with aa system on it (Small, so you have about 400 K left), copy SASH onto the floppy, and create a bin folder with at least the launch application in it. Then you can run up SASH from the floppy and boot A/UX via the floppy. Possible problems? Well, the Rodime drive seems very slow, and I did have a couple of hangs while copying the A/UX Root partition, as well as a couple of SCSI failures, but now that A/UX is on the Drive, I have had no problems. I have re-booted it several times, ran it for several hours, ran a few shell scripts etc. The local Australian Agents (SKI) also claim that they have an improved set of ROMs for the Rodime drives that make them behave better and make them faster. Hope to get to see it soon. If anyone needs more details, I can mail them info. Regards Richard Sharpe