louboutn@ccvax.ucd.ie (Sylvain Louboutin, Dept. of Computer Science) (03/16/91)
I am running Minix 1.3 on a XT clone equipped with 5 1/4 inch diskette drive without any problem. I would now like to run it on a Mitac MPC 2000V/VE (AT clone with a 286 cpu) and equipped with a single 3 1/2 inch diskette drive. I would like to boot from the diskette and do not want to use the hard disk (I would otherwise have some serious diplomatic problems with the colleague who kindly loaned it to me :-) ) ( the idea is that I am actually borrowing two Mitac PCs both equipped with ethernet cards and that I would later like to be able to do some experiment with the Amoeba networking utilities, and test on a real network some stuff that I developped on my XT (under Minix compiled with AM_KERNEL & NONET options.) But as a first step I would like to be able to boot and run it using the distribution version of Minix i.e. compiled without the Amoeba goodies. ) I managed to find another machine having both a 5 1/4 and a 3 1/2 inch diskette drives and was able to duplicate on 3 1/2 inch diskettes the boot, the root file system and the /usr diskettes from the distribution package. The 3 1/2 inches diskettes have been formatted with 720k (80 sectors/tracks; 9 cylinders; 512 bytes/sectors.) I can boot the Mitac from the 3 1/2 inch diskette I made that way. I can also check the two other diskettes as being apparently flawless using the standalone fsck (option 'f' check file system of the main menu.) So everything looks just fine so far *except* that when I press the '=' keystroke the system hangs and do not even start loading the ram disk. What did I do wrong? What should I do? I would greatly appreciate any input, many thanks in advance, -- --Sylvain R.Y. Louboutin fax: (+353-1) 697262 --Dept. of Computer Science, University College, Belfield, Dublin 4, -Ireland- --Louboutin@CCVAX.UCD.IE, SLOUBH91@IRLEARN.BITNET, Louboutin@ELCGL.EPFL.CH