ben@servalan.uucp (Ben Mesander) (02/18/91)
I am posting this for a friend who does not have news access. Replies to me will be forwarded to him (but why not just send it to him in the first place?) ---[begin included material from ahrea@gwdokokl.UUCP (Al Rea)]---------------- I have been having trouble changing the size of my RAM disk with MINIX 1.5. I have tried many different approaches, but I always get to the same point in the boot sequence, then the system hangs. The system comes up, I put in my modified root file system diskette, press '=' and it loads the RAM image. It gets to the message where it says to take out the root file system diskette, then hangs. If I use the distribution diskette instead, it continues from this point and says to put in the /usr disk. That message is in /etc/rc, so it is not getting that far. I have been trying to make a large RAM disk to hold as much of the system as possible. My most recent attempt went something like this: mkfs /dev/at0 1200 setup_root /dev/at0 1200 0 0 0 0 Then I copied as much of /usr/bin to the /bin on the diskette as I could get to fit. I then switch to my Amstrad 1386, which is where I want to run MINIX, boot DOS, use Roger Wang's program to copy the 5.25 disk to a 1.44 M 3.5 disk, then try to boot MINIX. It's probably something simple I'm doing wrong in setting up the RAM disk. Also, has anyone been able to use a Seagate ST01 SCSI host adaptor with MINIX? It is interferring with booting on my Amstrad. I have to pull the card out in order to boot MINIX, so I can't even use the BIOS to access the hard disk. The ST01 loads its own BIOS before any OS boots, and I suspect it is grabbing some area in low memory that MINIX wants. With the card in, the system just refuses to do anything with the MINIX boot disk, and insists that I "Put a SYSTEM disk in drive A: and press any key to continue". Although I have been pretty limited in what I could do on the Amstrad because I can't access the hard disk, nor use any more than the 130K RAM drive that came on the distribution disk, I am fairly sure MINIX will eventually run on the system. I was able to run all the tests in src/test successfully, but not the shell tests, since I couldn't fit all of the OS onto one 1.44M floppy. I also haven't been able to get MINIX to mount my external 5.25-in 1.2M drive on that system, even though DOS accesses it just fine. I use the same drive on my AT clone that I'm using to work on MINIX, and MINIX can use it fine on that system. Strange. I'd appreciate any suggestions anyone might have on this. Thanks. Al Rea (ahrea@gwdokokl.UUCP) -------------------------------------------------------------------- ben@epmooch.UUCP
wilker@gauss.math.purdue.edu (Clarence Wilkerson) (02/18/91)
I don't know anything about the ST01 and Minix, but if you're only using the hardware features of the card, i.e. have a scsi driver written for minix, the ROM can be pulled from the ST01. This will disable its inclusion in the boot process. Clarence Wilkerson