spock@opos.arc.nasa.gov (Son of Sarak) (10/03/90)
I have been trying to install Minix V1.2 on a NCR PC-4i (8MHZ IBM-XT
compatible) with a 20Mb hard drive, but have trouble creating a file system on
partition 2 of my hard disk. Other than the HD problem, Minix boots from
floppy without a problem and seems to work fine. I have been able to
build a file system in partition 1 of the HD, but then I can't get MS-DOS and
my other applications loaded onto partition 2! I would greatly appreciate it
if anyone out there in netland might have any ideas about how to fix
this problem so I can install DOS on partition 1 and a MINIX file system on
partition 2. I apologize if I am rehashing old problems - I looked in
bugs.nosc.mil for any relevant old MINIX mailing list articles but didn't
find anything that addressed my particular problem.
I'm not a hardware man, but these are the hardware spec's I could find:
Hard disk MiniScribe Model 3425
4 heads, 611 cylinders
20Mb capacity
Controller WD11C00-JT (Western Digital ?)
17-02 8618
The procedure I used is as follows:
1. HD partitioned and formatted under MS-DOS (actually my DOS bears the
copyrights of NCR-DOS 2.11.30 and MS-DOS 2.11). I only created
1 partition of 450 cyls (starting at cyl 0) and installed DOS there.
2. used EDPART.EXE v1.0 by Glen Knowles under DOS to create and format
a second partition ( a DOS(1) extension ) for MINIX, giving the
following final partition table
Partition Status System Type Cylinder
start stop
--------- ---------- ---------------- -----------
1 ACTIVE DOS bootable(1) 0 449
2 Read/Write DOS(1) extension 450 610
3. rebooted system using the floppy drive and Minix V1.2 boot disk
4. ran fdisk under MINIX ( #fdisk /dev/hd0 ) with the following result
Partition Type Begin End Active
--------- ---- ----- --- ------
1 Non-DOS 0 0 N
2 Non-DOS 0 0 N
3 DOS 0 449 A
4 Non-DOS 450 610 N
5. ran the diskdump utility under MINIX (#dd if=/dev/hd0 of=/dev/null
count=1000 ) as instructed in /user/doc/READ_ME to determine if the
hard disk driver software works with my hardware. It appears to have
worked fine, giving the results:
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
6. ran dd on partition 1 (# dd if=/dev/hd1 of=/dev/null count=1000) which
also worked OK, giving the same result as in step 5.
7. ran dd on partition 2 (# dd if=/dev/hd2 of=/dev/null count=1000) which
causes the hard disk in-use light to flash exactly twice and prints the
following message:
Unrecoverable disk error on device 3/2, block 0
dd:read error
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
8. ran dd on partitions 3 and 4 which in each case does not cause the in-use
light to flash and gives the output
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
9. tried to mkfs on partition 2 with the following results
# mkfs /dev/hd2 5440
Unrecoverable disk error on device 3/2, block 5439
Error:put_block couldn't write
Line 1 being processed when error detected.
Unrecoverable disk error on device 3/2, block 0
Unrecoverable disk ...
.
.
.
Thanks for any help!
-Phillip
pnsmith@ames.arc.nasa.gov