nevin@CIS.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Nick Nevin) (03/01/90)
I have recently acquired 1.3 for the ibm pc/at and it has been working fine
using the two floppy drives. Yesterday after backing up my hard drive
(ST 251-1, 44 meg) I started experimenting with getting minix onto the
hard drive. Before I started, the disk had two dos partitions
of +- 20 meg each. Partition 1 (active) contained all my dos stuff and
partition 2 was empty. My system is a Gateway 2000 286-16.
I performed the test to see if the hard drive could be used
(suggested in the USER_GUIDE from the minixdistribution)
viz dd if=/dev/hd0 of=/dev/null count=1000. All worked fine.
I created a filesystem on /dev/hd2 mounted it and copied some files to and fro
and all worked ok. Rebooting DOS 3.3 I found that partition 1 was still intact
and that partition 2 was no longer recognised as a dos partition as was to be
expected.
Now I wanted to place the root file system on /dev/hd3 so that it
could be set up into ram from the hard disk. This is where the problems
started.
First I could not get fdisk (msdos 3.3) to make 3 partitons on the
hard drive. So I settled for making 2 logical disks in the extended dos
partition (no 2). Now back to minix and I made a file system on /dev/hd2
and /dev/hd3. Mounting /dev/hd2 worked ok but mounting /dev/hd3 gave the error
that /dev/hd3 was not a valid file system.
Right now I decided to use the minix fdisk to partition the
hard drive.
I did "fdisk /dev/hd0" and it showed me the current partitioning
as
Part type begin end active
1 non-dos 0 409 A (btw why was this shown as non-dos?)
2 non-dos 410 819 N
3 non-dos 0 0 N
4 non-dos 0 0 N
I changed this to
Part type begin end active
1 non-dos 0 409 A
2 non-dos 410 799 N
3 non-dos 800 819 N
4 non-dos 0 0 N
but I could not write the new config getting
an error to the affect that partitions 1 and 2 overlapped?
Next I did fdisk /dev/hdx for x=1,2,3,4 and set all the partitions there
to be 0 to 0. I also booted dos and deleted the extended partition (2).
Back to minix and fdisk /dev/hd0 and again changed the partitions to
Part type begin end active
1 dos 0 409 A (NB. changed type to dos, could this have screwed
2 non-dos 410 799 N up the works in this partition)
3 non-dos 800 819 N
4 non-dos 0 0 N
This time the new config was accepted (written by the w command in fdisk)
However I still could not get /dev/hd3 to be recognised as a valid file system.
Worse still on rebooting dos the active dos partition 1 had been corrupted and
was no longer recognised as a dos partition. I reformatted it and only
+- 270 cylinders were formatted instead of 410. Running fdisk did not help
much. Selecting the option to print the partition information would just
hang the system. Trying to create new or delete current (primary or extended)
partitions also caused the system to hang.
So at the moment I have about a quarter of the hard disk available
and I can't seem to be able to fix it.
I guess I may have to do a low level format and then fdisk (dos) may work
properly??.
Can anyone out there help me out as to how to proceed from the current
situation and finally get three partitions on my disk as follows:
cyl 0-409 dos partition (active)
cyl 410-799 minix partition (/dev/hd2 ?)
cyl 800-819 minix parttion (/dev/hd3 ?) with root file system on it.
BTW currently minix fdisk gives the partition info as follows
(which does not mean much to me right now).
prt ac hd sec cyl sys hd sec cyl low size
1 80 0 2 0 1 3 51 99 1 27879
2 0 0 41 9A 0 3 D1 1F 27880 26520
3 0 0 C1 20 0 3 D1 32 54400 1292
4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Thanks
Nick.
Nicholas J. Nevin
usmail: 2094 Neil Ave #38
Columbus, OH 43210.
ph : (614) 293-9444
email : nevin@cis.ohio-state.edu