dc@caveat.berkeley.edu (Dave Cottingham) (01/18/91)
I cannot get Minix-386 to boot. In spite of the clear instructions provided by Tom McCabe, it don't go. I feel like an idiot. Please help. Here's what I did: I followed the McCabe tutorial. Everything went according to plan, except two things. 1) crc on mm/makefile.cpp didn't match (alarm bells go off) but visual inspection shows no obvious damage. Grabbed another copy, exactly like the first one. Conclude somebody changed it between creating runtime.crc and packaging. 2) Tute sez use 1.2 meg floppy. My boot drive is a 1.44 meg floppy, so I wrote a new disktab entry (louder alarm bells) for it and laced up a floppy. Here's what I see: shoelace goes in, loads up stuff, screen clears, I get the minix banner saying how big it, mem, ramdisk, and avail are, it tells me it's running in protected mode, and that's it. No further progress. Here's what I did in desperation: I checked to make sure absolutely nothing in /etc/rc didn't exist, per instructions. I then added a "/bin/echo hi there" line to the beginning of /etc/rc and made sure that /bin/echo was there. No message. I then patched init to write a message to the console before forking shell to read /etc/rc. No message. And I have used the check_cpu program to make sure everything on the boot disk is 386 code. Here's the plea for help: If anyone has run into trouble lacing up a 1.44 meg floppy, please let me know. If anyone has *succeeded* in lacing up such a floppy, please send me your disktab. Anyone had luck with a 720K floppy? Any other ideas what I did wrong? Thanks, Dave Cottingham dc@caveat.berkeley.edu