cracraft@ai.mit.edu (Stuart Cracraft) (09/17/90)
It was disappointing bringing up Minix 1.3. Its seeming total reliance on floppies and lack of well-documented hard disk support made bringing up the hard disk a real chore. fdisk couldn't seem to display any hexadecimal value over FF in the output to the "p" command. When using a hard disk with more than FF sectors I had to guess than the "6" displayed was really FE+6 hex for the end of the partition and subtract from it the starting value of the partition, guesswork at best. Picking the right 2nd parameter for mkfs for /dev/hd2 was hard and I wasn't even sure I got it right since the resulting /usr seemed too small. I run a 100mb ARRL technology Conner disk. I partitioned into two partitions of 50mb each. Eventually I got everything copied over from the floppies to the hard disk, but this too was a disappointment, because there are no clear instructions on exactly what directories on the floppies go to which directories on the hard disk. Another problem was the indication that on an AT "cp /dev/at0 /dev/hd3" would copy the root over. But no mention was made of whether /dev/hd3 would have to be mkfs'd and how that was to be done. This is especially vexing because one would normally make /dev/hd1 or /dev/hd2 the entire partition and only THEN would you find out you need to build a /dev/hd3 also for storing the root. What do you end up doing? Zapping the entire build of hd2 and then making hd3 followed by remaking hd2? And of course the lack of a bootable hard drive is the most notable problem of Minix 1.3 I can only hope that future Minix's correct these problems. Perhaps some of the people running 1.5.xx will comment on them. Eventually I deinstalled Minix and put DOS back up as the sole OS. Stuart