tony@oha.UUCP (Tony Olekshy) (10/05/89)
In message <1187@vsi.COM>, friedl@vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) writes: > > I will soon have the "opportunity" to run two different versions of UNIX > on my 386 (along with DOS) [how do I select the OS to boot?]... > > [3] boot a DOS program that prompts for the partition. > > ... Choices [2] or [3] might allow me to run everything on a big > (~700MB) drive, and I guess this would be best if I could find > it. A friend of mine recalls vaguely seeing something about [3] > but has no idea where he saw it. I once ran 2.1.3 here and I didn't have the ability to boot DOS from the "boot:" prompt. I had a Xenix utility that feed fdisk the keystrokes to activate the DOS partition, after which I haltsys'd; and a DOS utility to feed FDISK.EXE the keystrokes to activate the Xenix partition, after which I alt-ctl-del'd. Soo... if you put DOS on the first 32Mb of a big disk (perhaps using a WD1007-WA2 or one o' them cacheing controllers to make Xenix think it has less than 1024 tracks) and split the rest between the two Unixes, then a pair of utilities under each OS (named after the other two OSs), might do the job. Now the disclaimer: I am currently running a 25MHz AMI 386 with a ~320Mb MiniScribe 9830e &c. I tried an Adaptec 2322 (or such), which worked fine under DOS, but Xenix croaked (I have about 2 dozen pages of notes on attempted configurations, so it wasn't lack of effort). I got a WD1007-WA2 to try, and Xenix likes it. Now, however, responding "dos" to the "boot:" prompt sends the machine to never-never land. Instead, I leave a DOS boot floppy in the drive, which is labelled... *** OPERATING SYSTEM LEVER *** When someone wants to see the Adobe Illustrator, I just tell them to *** Throw That Lever Over There *** and `reboot`. Finally, although the Illustrator ran fine with the Adaptec, it gets in trouble with the WA2. Periodically (don't know distribution), it stalls for 15 seconds and I get a pop-up "Can't Access Hard Drive" dialog box. A response of "Retry" always succeeds with the screen update I was waiting for, almost immediately. However, this only works if I turn off the disk cacheing software, so Windows is now *paging*to*disk*. If you though unbatching news was hard on your drive, you should see this ;-(. I am planning to either get the Xenix ESDI upgrade and go back to the Adaptec, get a cacheing controller that the manufacturer assures me will work with Xenix 2.3.1 and Windows/386, or wait until SCO Unix V stabilizes. Comments? [Comments?! That was supposed to be a disclaimer!] Yours, etc., Tony Olekshy (...!alberta!oha!tony or tony@oha.UUCP).