mlewis@unocss.UUCP (Marcus S. Lewis) (08/11/89)
About 6 months ago, I posted a request for help on behalf of a friend
who owned a Tandy TX1000. Somebody responded in a posting, but my
mail bounced. That's thing 1.
The same guy just went out and bought a Laser Turbo XT (from Sears) with
hard disk and the whole show. And it won't boot Minix either. They are
claiming 100% compatibility with IBM, and he even replaced the BIOS ROM
with the one JDR Microdevices sells. No go. He is now getting the
message (not quoted) Bad Magic Number on boot disk (or some such).
He's getting to the point where he puts the / disk in, whereupon it
laughs at him. My friend is now 0 for 2 and desperate for Minix,
but too poor to buy just any old machine on the list. (the Sears charge
is wonderful thing)
I realize that Minix goes down to the bare metal, in the true programmer's
spirit, but this seems a bit ridiculous. HELP?!
Marc
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------Stefan.Schroer@cyber.urz.uni-wuppertal.dbp.de (01/24/91)
Hello all, last days there has been a question, why the menu appears after booting but after hitting '=' the computer hangs. I've had the same problem on an 386 PC, and a long time with many recompiling sessions on other machines has gone. Here some points of my solution: Hardware: 386, 8MB Ram, MFM harddisk controller. After you hit '=' the function cstart (kernel/cstart.c) will be executed to find out what processor you have. But it will not only ask your magic-byte, whether you have an PC_AT or not, it will also read the sub-magic-byte from the BIOS, whether you have a PS/2 or not. On my 386 the sub-magic-byte is the same as for the PS-50Z (0xBA) and that's the point. The following code will do some special PS-work but this won't be OK. I have patched (a copy!!!) of my boot disk so that the cstart function don't not longer read the bios for the magic bytes. If you use a disk editor search the bytes 0xff,0xff. They are near sector 2/3. This is part of the command MOV AX,#0xFFFF. The next byte is PUSH AX, then follows the command CALL _getword. This CALL you can patch to MOV AX,#0x00FC. b8 0e 00 mov ax,#0x000e 50 push ax b8 ff ff mov ax,#0xffff 50 push ax change to e8 ll hh call _get_word --------------> b8 fc 00 mov ax,#0x00fc I know that this is not the fine way, but if you want Minix running..... After your boot, install Minix, change all PS specific parts. I hope that this will help, Enyoy, Stefan Schroer