Pat_Barron@transarc.com (12/01/90)
Can anybody tell me what I need to do to make Minix on the Atari ST talk to my Supra hard drive? The Supra seems to take over my system in a pretty big way, and completely disallows booting from a floppy with an executable boot sector (like the Minix boot floppy....). Creating a MINIX.IMG file from the boot floppy and using MINIX.PRG to load it will let Minix boot, but then I immediately get a "Kernel panic: got message from task -1" and "Press RESET". Any hints would be appreciated greatly..... --Pat.
Pat_Barron@transarc.com (12/04/90)
Well, I've solved part of my own problem - the part about not being able to boot Minix from floppy. It turns out that, once you boot from the hard disk, I guess the SUPBOOT.SYS program rewires the RESET interrupt vector, and pressing the reset button no longer causes the "normal" thing to occur. I can boot Minix just fine from floppy if I power-cycle the machine first. I still can not get Minix to actually boot up completely, though - the 10.BOOT disk boots, sometimes prints the Minix banner message, and immediately gives "Kernel Panic: disk task got message from -1" (I messed up the wording of the error message in my previous message). Someone suggested applying a patch that The Minix Centre was distributing for ST Minix and the Supra hard drive, but I've looked at my sources, and the patch is already installed. This, BTW, is ST Minix version 1.1. Again, any help would be greatly appreciated. --Pat.
UNM409%DBNRHRZ1.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Volker A. Brandt) (12/07/90)
Pat Barron writes: >Well, I've solved part of my own problem - the part about not being able >to boot Minix from floppy. It turns out that, once you boot from the >hard disk, I guess the SUPBOOT.SYS program rewires the RESET interrupt vector, >and pressing the reset button no longer causes the "normal" thing to occur. >I can boot Minix just fine from floppy if I power-cycle the machine first. This is not the fault of your SUPBOOT program. You see. there is a system variable (a magic location where the ST keeps information) called _bootdev or some such, where the ST saves the drive that the system last booted from AND IT WILL BOOT FROM NEXT. This is set to A: on cold boot and reset to C: when booting from the hard disk partition C: succeeded. There are two possible fixes for you: (a) Write a little program that sets this variable back to A:, then reset the machine. You can even boot from RAM disks this way -- if they survive the reset. (b) Use any coldboot program (they are easy to write and float around), OR press Control-Alt-RightShift-Del if you have TOS1.4. >I still can not get Minix to actually boot up completely, though - the 10.BOOT >disk boots, sometimes prints the Minix banner message, and immediately gives >"Kernel Panic: disk task got message from -1" (I messed up the wording of >the error message in my previous message). Someone suggested applying a patch >that The Minix Centre was distributing for ST Minix and the Supra hard drive, >but I've looked at my sources, and the patch is already installed. This, BTW, >is ST Minix version 1.1. This sounds strange. My ICD host adapter + Fujitsu SCSI drive work fine. I sometimes get a Memory Manager panic which is probably due to having exactly 4 MB RAM free. Hope this helps some. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bitnet: UNM409@DBNRHRZ1 Volker A. Brandt UUCP: ...!unido!DBNRHRZ1.bitnet!unm409 Angewandte Mathematik ARPAnet: UNM409%DBNRHRZ1.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (Bonn, West Germany)