bdale@relay.hp.com (Bdale Garbee) (10/29/90)
Hi. This is mostly directed to Bruce, but since others might benefit from the feedback, I decided to post here. I am right now installing Minix on my pc532 on a 20meg HP Nighthawk mech, which is utterly incapable of operating on my workstation. So, I decided to give the serial download process a whirl. Bruce, your Install document is fantastic. But, I ran into a few gotchas. In section 3, just before the line "Now, cross your fingers and type "run".", you need to do a 'set bkpt0 0', at least on my rev of the monitor, otherwise you keep getting the breakpoint msg. In section 4, the partition table had moved... no problem since I checked the minix.nm file... In section 5, you remark that compress should be linked to uncompress and zcat. The ln binary is not on your minimal system. When I tried to do ncat /dev/hd3 400818 | compress -d > lib.tar I got a message about "stdin: no in compressed format". However, when I ran ncat /dev/hd3 400818 > lib.tar.Z compress -d < lib.tar.Z > lib.tar Everything worked fine... I'm downloading the second of my .tar.Z files now... Why, oh why, didn't you include kermit on the minimum filesystem? This download/boot/unpack/reboot/repeat is really slow... guess if I was smart I would have downloaded just kermit, and used kermit to transfer the rest? Nah, too easy... :-) Also, I'm getting frequent messages about SCSI timeouts when doing large amounts of file operations. This disk is *slow*, is there any chance I just need to extend the timeout time? Seems odd, but... The errors are non-fatal, since the first retry seems to work. These crop up one at a time every so often during a long operation, such as: # compress -d < lib.tar.Z > lib.tar SCSI: timeout SCSI failure, key 0x5, code 0x24, log adr 0x0, sense buf 0xC462 SCSI: timeout SCSI failure, key 0x5, code 0x24, log adr 0x0, sense buf 0xC462 SCSI: timeout SCSI failure, key 0x5, code 0x24, log adr 0x0, sense buf 0xC462 SCSI: timeout SCSI failure, key 0x5, code 0x24, log adr 0x0, sense buf 0xC462 SCSI: timeout SCSI failure, key 0x5, code 0x24, log adr 0x0, sense buf 0xC462 SCSI: timeout SCSI failure, key 0x5, code 0x24, log adr 0x0, sense buf 0xC462 SCSI: timeout SCSI failure, key 0x5, code 0x24, log adr 0x0, sense buf 0xC462 # tar t lib.tar Bdale