root@mjbtn.MFEE.TN.US (Mark J. Bailey) (09/07/88)
Hello,
We have Minix 1.2 and are teaching course in advanced operating systems
and plan to walk through the Minix source code through the semester.
My question is, is it possible to install Minix on a harddisk partition
such that DOS and Minix could somewhat co-exist on the harddisk? I seem
to recall someone mentioning it once, but that was a while back.
Also, with version 1.3 coming out, what (and how much) is the best method
for getting upgrade (or new) disks to version 1.3, and who should I contact?
Thanks in advance.
Mark.
--
Mark J. Bailey "Y'all com bak naw, ya hear!"
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FIDO: Mark Bailey at Net/Node 1:116/12 | Murfreesboro, TN USAhedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) (09/08/88)
At least in 1.3 (I don't know 1.2) you can put all but the boot floppy on hard disk. You need three partitions. Partition 1 would be DOS, partition 2 would be Minix /usr, and partition 3 would be Minix root. If you leave the boot floppy in the drive when you hit =, rather than putting in the root floppy, Minix tries to load the RAM disk from a file system on partition 3. So you put root there. Of course you have to modify /etc/rc to mount /dev/hd2 as /usr rather than asking the user to insert the floppy. Once you've done this, to boot DOS you reboot with no floppy in the drive. To boot Minix you reboot with the Minix boot floppy in the drive.
vandys@hpisoa1.HP.COM (Andrew Valencia) (09/09/88)
/ hpisoa1:comp.os.minix / hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) / 10:38 pm Sep 7, 1988 / >At least in 1.3 (I don't know 1.2) you can put all but the boot floppy >on hard disk. Even 1.1 can be made to do this with little trouble. The major/minor numbers are encoded in the constants ROOTDEV and BOOTDEV (if memory serves) in the h/ directory. Changing ROOTDEV to the hard disk partition, and chopping out the floppy-to-rootdev copy results in a very nice root partition on hard disk, with a much faster boot. Putting even the boot floppy on hard disk is possible; the diffs went by a couple of months ago--all it required was some changes to bootblok.s. Please don't ask me for them; I haven't done this myself (I change kernels too often!) Andy
emb978@leah.Albany.Edu (Eric M. Boehm) (09/09/88)
In article <Sep.8.01.38.20.1988.2907@athos.rutgers.edu>, hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) writes: > At least in 1.3 (I don't know 1.2) you can put all but the boot floppy > on hard disk. You need three partitions. Partition 1 would be DOS, > partition 2 would be Minix /usr, and partition 3 would be Minix root. > If you leave the boot floppy in the drive when you hit =, rather than > putting in the root floppy, Minix tries to load the RAM disk from a > file system on partition 3. So you put root there. Of course you > have to modify /etc/rc to mount /dev/hd2 as /usr rather than asking > the user to insert the floppy. Once you've done this, to boot DOS > you reboot with no floppy in the drive. To boot Minix you reboot > with the Minix boot floppy in the drive. This is slightly inaccurate, at least for version 1.3. Following instructions someone else posted, I was able to put the root file system on the hard disk. This is (in my opinion) much better because /tmp is now on the hard disk. I was having quite a few problems with patch running out of temp disk space. If I increased the size of the RAM disk, then I got out of memory errors. You could put the boot on the hard disk. I did not do so because my particular hardware will not let me boot from more than 1 partition. However, with three partitions, you could have DOS on partition 1, root file system on partition 2, and boot on partition 3. As far as I can tell (I have not verified this), you should be able to put the boot on partition three a la "build bootblok fs mm kernel init fsck /dev/hd3" Eric M. Boehm EMB978@ALBNY1VX.BITNET EMB978@LEAH.ALBANY.EDU
brucee@runx.ips.oz (Bruce Evans) (09/13/88)
Andrew Valencia writes: >in the h/ directory. Changing ROOTDEV to the hard disk partition, and >chopping out the floppy-to-rootdev copy results in a very nice root partition >on hard disk, with a much faster boot. Yes, there's little more to do than changing ROOTDEV. I made ROOTDEV a _variable_ and arranged for the boot program to initialize it interactively at boot time. Much the same was done for the root image device (BOOTDEV?) which still gets used if ROOTDEV is /dev/ram, and the RAM disk size which may no longer be determined from the image. Actually, I soon got tired of typing the device names and changed Marty Leisner's boot-from-DOS build.c to set them up from a DOS batch file. This allows the image to be kept in pieces for convenient testing of different versions, and booting from both hard and floppy disks almost as transparently as using a bootstrap loader. A Minix-only version version remains to be done. These changes are hard to extract from others in my kernel ... Bruce Evans Internet: brucee@runx.ips.oz.au UUCP: uunet!runx.ips.oz.au!brucee