friedl@vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) (09/24/89)
Hi folks,
I will soon have the "opportunity" to run two different
versions of UNIX on my 386 (along with DOS) and I wish to avoid
losing my mind switching between the two. Each UNIX will
probably have its own ESDI hard disk, with DOS being on one of
the drives as well.
Right now it looks like I'll have to manually swap cables
going to the drives to get the UNIX of interest to drive zero
so I can boot, and I will lose interest in this rapidly: I
gotta find another way.
Current thoughts are to try one of:
[1] some kind of drive cable switch box
[2] replacing the boot block (aka Microport's boot?)
[3] boot a DOS program that prompts for the partition
[4] something else
Choices [2] or [3] might allow me to run everything on a big
(~700MB) drive, and I guess this would be best if I could find
it. A friend of mine recalls vaguely seeing something about [3]
but has no idea where he saw it.
Any ideas? Please?
Steve
--
Stephen J. Friedl / V-Systems, Inc. / Santa Ana, CA / +1 714 545 6442
3B2-kind-of-guy / {attmail uunet}!vsi!{bang!}friedl / friedl@vsi.com
"This posting is a word to the wise, but you can read it too" - medag@fciva.FRANKLIN.COM (Daniel A. Graifer) (09/28/89)
In article <1187@vsi.COM> friedl@vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) writes: > I will soon have the "opportunity" to run two different >versions of UNIX on my 386 (along with DOS) and I wish to avoid >losing my mind switching between the two. Each UNIX will >probably have its own ESDI hard disk, with DOS being on one of >the drives as well. >[...] >-- >Stephen J. Friedl / V-Systems, Inc. / Santa Ana, CA / +1 714 545 6442 >3B2-kind-of-guy / {attmail uunet}!vsi!{bang!}friedl / friedl@vsi.com > >"This posting is a word to the wise, but you can read it too" - me If you are not wedded to ESDI, the WD7000FASST SCSI Controller on my machine, if it sees more than 1 bootable partition, asks which one to use. I've only tried it with 2 (DOS & Bell Tech), but I can see no reason why 3 wouldn't work. I like this board, and the Columbia Data Products software that comes with it. Good luck Dan The address below is no longer strictly valid, as the Company is out of business. But the machine remains up and running for now.... --- Daniel A. Graifer Franklin Capital Investments uunet!fciva!dag 7900 Westpark Drive, Suite A130 (703)821-3244 McLean, VA 22102
tony@oha.UUCP (Tony Olekshy) (10/05/89)
In message <1187@vsi.COM>, friedl@vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) writes: > > I will soon have the "opportunity" to run two different versions of UNIX > on my 386 (along with DOS) [how do I select the OS to boot?]... > > [3] boot a DOS program that prompts for the partition. > > ... Choices [2] or [3] might allow me to run everything on a big > (~700MB) drive, and I guess this would be best if I could find > it. A friend of mine recalls vaguely seeing something about [3] > but has no idea where he saw it. I once ran 2.1.3 here and I didn't have the ability to boot DOS from the "boot:" prompt. I had a Xenix utility that feed fdisk the keystrokes to activate the DOS partition, after which I haltsys'd; and a DOS utility to feed FDISK.EXE the keystrokes to activate the Xenix partition, after which I alt-ctl-del'd. Soo... if you put DOS on the first 32Mb of a big disk (perhaps using a WD1007-WA2 or one o' them cacheing controllers to make Xenix think it has less than 1024 tracks) and split the rest between the two Unixes, then a pair of utilities under each OS (named after the other two OSs), might do the job. Now the disclaimer: I am currently running a 25MHz AMI 386 with a ~320Mb MiniScribe 9830e &c. I tried an Adaptec 2322 (or such), which worked fine under DOS, but Xenix croaked (I have about 2 dozen pages of notes on attempted configurations, so it wasn't lack of effort). I got a WD1007-WA2 to try, and Xenix likes it. Now, however, responding "dos" to the "boot:" prompt sends the machine to never-never land. Instead, I leave a DOS boot floppy in the drive, which is labelled... *** OPERATING SYSTEM LEVER *** When someone wants to see the Adobe Illustrator, I just tell them to *** Throw That Lever Over There *** and `reboot`. Finally, although the Illustrator ran fine with the Adaptec, it gets in trouble with the WA2. Periodically (don't know distribution), it stalls for 15 seconds and I get a pop-up "Can't Access Hard Drive" dialog box. A response of "Retry" always succeeds with the screen update I was waiting for, almost immediately. However, this only works if I turn off the disk cacheing software, so Windows is now *paging*to*disk*. If you though unbatching news was hard on your drive, you should see this ;-(. I am planning to either get the Xenix ESDI upgrade and go back to the Adaptec, get a cacheing controller that the manufacturer assures me will work with Xenix 2.3.1 and Windows/386, or wait until SCO Unix V stabilizes. Comments? [Comments?! That was supposed to be a disclaimer!] Yours, etc., Tony Olekshy (...!alberta!oha!tony or tony@oha.UUCP).