V2057A%TEMPLEVM@pucc.princeton.edu (Juan Jose Noyles) (10/03/90)
Hola, Mnx'ers! After what seemed to be forever, I've finally gotten a machine that can run Minix, and I was trying to get started. I inserted my 1.2Mb boot floppy into the drive, turned the machine on (a 20Mhz 386 "GENE II". Don't ask me who they are. It was cheap. 8Mb RAM, 80Mb SCSI drive w/controller for $2100) and was greeted by "Strike F1 to try reboot or F2 for setup". What happened? I recall getting this running on a 286 that I couldn't keep it on, and I recall shipping the diskettes to Alan Saichek in Mt. View, but he never got them. Q: can I get new diskettes without money?
paradis@crater.ZK3.DEC.COM (Jim Paradis) (10/11/90)
In article <32160@nigel.ee.udel.edu>, V2057A%TEMPLEVM@pucc.princeton.edu (Juan Jose Noyles) writes: > After what seemed to be forever, I've finally gotten a machine that can > run Minix, and I was trying to get started. I inserted my 1.2Mb boot > floppy into the drive, turned the machine on (a 20Mhz 386 "GENE II". Don't > ask me who they are. It was cheap. 8Mb RAM, 80Mb SCSI drive w/controller > for $2100) and was greeted by "Strike F1 to try reboot or F2 for setup". I had the same problem when I tried to bring up MINIX on my 386 box. Like you, I was able to get MINIX running just fine on my old XT clone (I was the first on my block to have MINIX 1.1 8-) ), then later on my 286. After much poking around and reading through files full of Deep Dark DOS Secrets, it turns out that a bootblock should theoretically have the magic number 0x55aa in the last two bytes to indicate that it's a valid bootblock. Theoretically, no magic number should mean no boot. In reality, though, most bootloaders just ignore these bytes and try to run whatever it reads in from the disk. Fixing this is slightly non-trivial, since the MINIX bootblok uses the last four words of the file to hold the segment and PC addresses of the kernel and fsck (pre-1.5) or menu (1.5). If you send me a snail-mail address, I'll send you a MINIX 1.3 boot diskette that will boot up on a machine such as yours. As soon as I get MINIX 1.5 all the way up on my machine and onto USENET, I'll post the diffs to bootblok and build that will avoid this problem... (I'm almost done with 1.5. I did it the hard way via upgrade kits: 1.1 -> 1.2 -> 1.3 -> 1.5. Fortunately, I'd bought the UniPress compiler sources so I was able to do cross-development under System V; now all I have to do is repartition my disks and get all the goodies onto it...) -- Jim Paradis, working at but not employed by DEC. (603)881-1221 paradis@decvax.dec.com "All I got was a rock!"