hlin@cbnewsi.att.com (hua.t.lin) (01/22/91)
I just bought a Parkard-Bell 386sx machine and have Minix 1.5 which will not boot. It comes up with the line Booting Minix 1.5 followed by a line `read error, automatic reboot' which comes on an off while the diskette is spinning. I also have Minix 1.0 which has the following problem on this machine. It can do a root file system `fsck' during boot, but the diskette keep spinning when `=' is hit. The machine has 386SX, 1.2 Meg drive A, 1.44 Meg drive B, 84 Meg Seagate ST 1106 drive C, 1 Meg memory. Any information, advice greatly appreciated. Or pointers to how to create a boot diskette for this machine from where I am. - lin
agodwin@acorn.co.uk (Adrian Godwin) (01/23/91)
In article <1991Jan22.144946.19967@cbnewsi.att.com> hlin@cbnewsi.att.com (hua.t.lin) writes: >I just bought a Parkard-Bell 386sx machine and have Minix 1.5 which will not >boot. It comes up with the line Booting Minix 1.5 followed by a line >`read error, automatic reboot' which comes on an off while the diskette is >spinning. >I also have Minix 1.0 which has the following problem on this machine. It can >do a root file system `fsck' during boot, but the diskette keep spinning >when `=' is hit. >The machine has 386SX, 1.2 Meg drive A, 1.44 Meg drive B, 84 Meg Seagate >ST 1106 drive C, 1 Meg memory. >Any information, advice greatly appreciated. Or pointers to how to create a >boot diskette for this machine from where I am. >- lin I think a thread has just finished on the problems with the 1.5.10 bootblok. In short, the bootblok doesn't cope (on all machines) with a 360K disc in a 1.2meg drive. If you can run the system on another machine, the simplest answer is to rebuild the boot disc using 1.2meg format. The bootblok seems to work OK if it doesn't try to use the 720K disc parameter block - the second attempt it makes - possibly because it expects it at a fixed position in the BIOS. This may not be the case, even on a machine which supports 3.5" media. Alternatively, rebuild using one of the recently-posted fixes to the bootblok. If you can't do either of these, the following may work : Use DOS debug (or some sector editor) to read all the blocks off the 360K disc into memory, or a hard disc file. You should be able to do this on the 1.2meg drive. Again using DOS debug, write all the blocks back out onto a 1.2meg disc. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Adrian Godwin (agodwin@acorn.co.uk)