justicec@handel.cs.colostate.edu (Christopher Justice) (03/24/91)
I'm having a problem installing both AT+T System V R3.2.2 and Dos 4.0 on the same disk drive. I partioned the drive (330 meg) into an 80 meg Dos partition and the rest for unix. They installed succesfully, but Dos gives me a "General failure reading drive C:" when I try to run programs. This happens irregularly. Unix has given me a couple of "unrequested harddrive interrupt errors". Our computer Vendor is trying to tell us that you can not install unix and dos on the same drive, or possibly that dos can not take up more than 9% of the drive. I find this hard to believe. If Dos and unix are on different partitions, it shouldn't matter. Is using Dos and unix on the same drive common? Can you do this? I'd like to hear about your experience with doing this. Thank you! Chris Justice justicec@cs.colostate.edu Chris Justice justicec@cs.colostate.edu
jrh@mustang.dell.com (Randy Howard) (03/24/91)
In article <13719@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU>, justicec@handel.cs.colostate.edu (Christopher Justice) writes: |> I'm having a problem installing both AT+T System V R3.2.2 and Dos 4.0 on the |> same disk drive. I partioned the drive (330 meg) into an 80 meg Dos |> partition and the rest for unix. They installed succesfully, but Dos gives |> me a "General failure reading drive C:" when I try to run programs. This |> happens irregularly. Unix has given me a couple of "unrequested harddrive |> interrupt errors". |> |> Our computer Vendor is trying to tell us that you can not install unix |> and dos on the same drive, or possibly that dos can not take up more than |> 9% of the drive. I find this hard to believe. If Dos and unix are on |> different partitions, it shouldn't matter. |> |> Is using Dos and unix on the same drive common? Can you do this? I'd like |> to hear about your experience with doing this. |> Very common. We ship a large percentage of our pre-installed UNIX systems w/DOS partitions. Both the 3.2 and V4 products support DOS partitions; at boot time you can select which one you wish to come up on (default to UNIX). I would say your vendor is probably confused. |> Thank you! |> |> Chris Justice |> justicec@cs.colostate.edu -- Randy Howard !'s:uunet!dell!mustang!jrh Dell Computer Corp. @'s:jrh@mustang.dell.com
sblair@upurbmw.dell.com (Steve Blair) (03/25/91)
[following are related to DELL UNIX, but apply to others] UNIX & DOS can peacefully co-exist on the same disk, in our releases at least. Very few things can cause them to not exist. Usually I format the system disk, make a partition for DOS & UNIX(default boot partition), install UNIX, then go and format c:, and install DOS. The only real gotcha that I can see from your post(below) is the addition of DOS 4.0 . Many UNIX implementations can not deal with DOS *higher* than(!!) 3.3 . Try loading 3.3 DOS, and see if that's more reliable..... -- Steve Blair DELL UNIX DIVISION sblair@upurbmw.dell.com ================================================================ In article <13719@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU>, justicec@handel.cs.colostate.edu (Christopher Justice) writes: |> I'm having a problem installing both AT+T System V R3.2.2 and Dos 4.0 on the |> same disk drive. I partioned the drive (330 meg) into an 80 meg Dos |> partition and the rest for unix. They installed succesfully, but Dos gives |> me a "General failure reading drive C:" when I try to run programs. This |> happens irregularly. Unix has given me a couple of "unrequested harddrive |> interrupt errors". |> |> Our computer Vendor is trying to tell us that you can not install unix |> and dos on the same drive, or possibly that dos can not take up more than |> 9% of the drive. I find this hard to believe. If Dos and unix are on |> different partitions, it shouldn't matter. |> |> Is using Dos and unix on the same drive common? Can you do this? I'd like |> to hear about your experience with doing this. |> |> Thank you! |> |> Chris Justice |> justicec@cs.colostate.edu |> Chris Justice |> justicec@cs.colostate.edu
bamford@cbnewsd.att.com (harold.e.bamford) (03/26/91)
In article <13719@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU> justicec@handel.cs.colostate.edu (Christopher Justice) writes: >I'm having a problem installing both AT+T System V R3.2.2 and Dos 4.0 on the >same disk drive. I partioned the drive (330 meg) into an 80 meg Dos >partition and the rest for unix. They installed succesfully, but Dos gives >me a "General failure reading drive C:" when I try to run programs. This >happens irregularly. Unix has given me a couple of "unrequested harddrive >interrupt errors". > >Our computer Vendor is trying to tell us that you can not install unix >and dos on the same drive, or possibly that dos can not take up more than >9% of the drive. I find this hard to believe. If Dos and unix are on >different partitions, it shouldn't matter. > >Is using Dos and unix on the same drive common? Can you do this? I'd like >to hear about your experience with doing this. We have both DOS (3.2) and unix (SVR2) on the same disk in our 6386. One problem we had was that DOS doesn't like partitions over about 32 Meg. Your vendor says you should have no more than 9% of your 330 Meg drive. That's 29.7 Meg. Perhaps this is your problem. You CAN have multiple DOS partitions, however... Also, we found that the DOS partition had to be the first TRACKS on the disk and that unix had to have the first partition NUMBER on the disk. This was probably just a local anomoly, but after two weeks of screwing around, we finally got both unix and DOS running on the same disk. Good luck. -- Harold Bamford #include <usual.disclaimers>
cmilono@netcom.COM (Carlo Milono) (03/26/91)
In article <13719@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU> justicec@handel.cs.colostate.edu (Christopher Justice) writes: >I'm having a problem installing both AT+T System V R3.2.2 and Dos 4.0 on the >same disk drive. I partioned the drive (330 meg) into an 80 meg Dos >partition and the rest for unix. They installed succesfully, but Dos gives >me a "General failure reading drive C:" when I try to run programs. This >happens irregularly. Unix has given me a couple of "unrequested harddrive >interrupt errors". > >Our computer Vendor is trying to tell us that you can not install unix >and dos on the same drive, or possibly that dos can not take up more than >9% of the drive. I find this hard to believe. If Dos and unix are on >different partitions, it shouldn't matter. > >Is using Dos and unix on the same drive common? Can you do this? I'd like >to hear about your experience with doing this. > My PC at home is setup with 120MB of UNIX V 3.2.3 and 32MB of DOS 3.3. I initialized the HDU upon booting/loading the UNIX foundation set and requested the above mentioned partitions; I finished loading UNIX, did a UNIX version of FDISK, switched to the DOS partition, formatted it with the OS, loaded my apps, and voila! In addition, I loaded Simultask on the UNIX partition, loaded DOS (same version), and did a 'dosslice' so that I can run DOS apps resident on the DOS partition from the DOS emulator on the UNIX partition. I have had no problems. I have seen troubles with DOS 4.0 in the following scenarios: 1) the machine had 'antique' BIOS 2) the DOS was for a different machine (Compaq DOS on an ALR, e.g.) -- +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Carlo Milono: cmilono@netcom.apple.com or apple!netcom!cmilono | |"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, | |that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." - Jonathan Swift | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
wallyk@bicycle.WV.TEK.COM (Wally Kramer) (03/26/91)
justicec@handel.cs.colostate.edu (Christopher Justice) writes: >I'm having a problem installing both AT+T System V R3.2.2 and Dos 4.0 on >the same disk drive. I partioned the drive (330 meg) into an 80 meg Dos >partition and the rest for unix. They installed succesfully, but Dos gives >me a "General failure reading drive C:" when I try to run programs. This >happens irregularly. Unix has given me a couple of "unrequested harddrive >interrupt errors". ... I've done this with SCO Unix (*not* Xenix). There were two ways I've done it. Method 1 is to keep the first partition DOS, as DOS (3.30 at least) seems to care. Make the second partition Unix and make it bootable (the "active" partition). Unix boots by default. To boot DOS, just stick in a DOS floppy and boot from that. My autoexec.bat on the disk just ran c:autoexec and the config.sys on the floppy was the same as the one on the hard drive. Method 2, used with a later release of SCO Unix, used the same partitioning strategy, but made use of a feature of the unix boot loader: if you typed "dos" instead of just return (or let it timeout), it would boot the dos partition. ----- Wally Kramer contracted from Step Technology, Portland, Oregon 503 244 1239 wallyk@orca.WV.TEK.COM +1 503 685 2658
resnicks@netcom.COM (Steve Resnick) (03/26/91)
In article <1991Mar25.164947.10980@cbnewsd.att.com> bamford@cbnewsd.att.com (harold.e.bamford) writes: >In article <13719@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU> justicec@handel.cs.colostate.edu (Christopher Justice) writes: >>I'm having a problem installing both AT+T System V R3.2.2 and Dos 4.0 on the >>same disk drive. I partioned the drive (330 meg) into an 80 meg Dos >>partition and the rest for unix. They installed succesfully, but Dos gives >>me a "General failure reading drive C:" when I try to run programs. This >>happens irregularly. Unix has given me a couple of "unrequested harddrive >>interrupt errors". >> >>Our computer Vendor is trying to tell us that you can not install unix >>and dos on the same drive, or possibly that dos can not take up more than >>9% of the drive. I find this hard to believe. If Dos and unix are on >>different partitions, it shouldn't matter. >> >>Is using Dos and unix on the same drive common? Can you do this? I'd like >>to hear about your experience with doing this. > >We have both DOS (3.2) and unix (SVR2) on the same disk in our >6386. One problem we had was that DOS doesn't like partitions over >about 32 Meg. Your vendor says you should have no more than 9% of >your 330 Meg drive. That's 29.7 Meg. Perhaps this is your >problem. You CAN have multiple DOS partitions, however... Also, >we found that the DOS partition had to be the first TRACKS on the >disk and that unix had to have the first partition NUMBER on the >disk. This was probably just a local anomoly, but after two weeks >of screwing around, we finally got both unix and DOS running on the >same disk. > >Good luck. > >-- Harold Bamford > >#include <usual.disclaimers> I can see the problem with DOS 3.2 - DOS 3.2 didn't have an extended partition. I have had successfully, DOS 3.3 and DOS 4.01 on the same disk as Esix Sys V3.2 I was running with a Priam ID768 330 Meg ESDI drive on a Micronics/Wietek 386/20. What kind of drive and controller are you using? Are you using a "proprietary" partition. (eg Disk Mangler, Ontrack, Speed Stor, etc)? - Steve -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- resnicks@netcom.com, steve@camphq, IFNA: 1:143/105.0, USNail: 530 Lawrence Expressway, Suite 374 Sunnyvale, Ca 94086 - In real life: Steve Resnick. Flames, grammar and spelling errors >/dev/null 0x2b |~ 0x2b, THAT is the question. The Asylum OS/2 BBS - (408)263-8017 12/2400,8,1 - Running Maximus CBCS 1.2 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
rwhite@nusdecs.uucp (Robert White) (03/27/91)
In article <13719@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU> justicec@handel.cs.colostate.edu (Christopher Justice) writes: >Is using Dos and unix on the same drive common? Can you do this? I'd like >to hear about your experience with doing this. Hi, I have a 6386E at home on which I run DOS 3.3a and SVR3.2.1. I also use the bootmenu program to select which partition to run durring bootup. I also adminstrate several systems here and have found the following to be true: 1) Yes, you can run DOS and UNIX on the same system, but if you use Simultask you will need the latest release for it to handle 4.01. 2) 4.0 and 4.01 DOS will write to the last sector of the disk when you run fdisk (not true on all releases, aparently AT&Ts 4.01 no longer does this, or so they claim) I am not shure if this is one of those things that went away with 4.01 universally or not but it can be annoying. 3) Soft reboots (<ctl><alt><delete>) are insufficent for changing between operating systems. The reset and test routines for the hardware as found in the operating systems and BIOS are not up to the task of properly resetting all the options on all the controllers. "Internal serial port Failed" messages from the diagnostics are a symptom, but certianly not the only one. SCSI (and perhaps ESDI) drives with intelegent controllers will sometimes have remnants of outstanding requests on them and you will get "unexpected harddrive interrupt"s especially on the "really smart" controllers. The entire problem is releived if you *ALWAYS* use the hardware reset button to reset the system when you change between DOS and UNIX as this will either (I dont remember which it is off the top of my head) use the reset line on the bus, or actually power-down the CPU (which also then causes the hardware reset line to be triggered) I have expanded the habbit to simply never use <ctrl><alt><del> to reset my system. 4) The older versions of DOS require that the bootable DOS partition be the first partition (or at least lie compleetly within the first 33.2 or something like that 8-). 4.0 aledged to relax this requirement, but was buggy. 4.01 supposedly fixes the huge number of bugs and indeed does allow the partition to be any size and anyware on the disk. 5) The IBM brain-damage used to define the partition table puts a limit of 1024 partitionable cylinders on the hard disk. Many controllers "spoof" the operating system into beleiving that there are a legal number of cylinders by lowering the cylinder count and raising the head count. This can impact the perfromance of the SVR3 disk scheduler (bdsched), but worse yet the controler has to store the spoofing information on the hard disk so that it is available durring the option-rom part of a reboot. (another good reason to always use hardware reset) Sometimes this conflicts with real data on the drive. I have one system that, whenever you do the controller setup you then have to go in and use the UNIX System Foundation Set Disk 1 and the mkpart to reload the boot tracks into the UNIX partition. Some device drivers are available to combat the spoofing performance problem under both UNIX and DOS. If either of these environments uses a special driver for your disk (may be even a builtin in 4.01 or something?) you *MUST* use the hardware reset if you expect your data to survive. I know I keep harping on the hardware reset button, but that technique has made more than one round of finger-pointing-by-manufacturers go away here. To date the technique has helped with 2 brands of cartredge tape drives, one brand of disk controller, PCOX cards, and every kind of serial communications card imaginable. Had I my dream, standardized software reset methodoligies would be set and adheared to; but until that day I know I will be seeing problems that come and go because of the particular order of programs run under one OS followed by the loading of another OS. Not a terminal (haha) flaw, but it can suprise you. -- Robert C. White Jr. | The degree to which a language may be Network Administrator | classified as a "living" language National University | is best expressed as the basic ratio crash!nusdecs!rwhite | of its speakers to its linguists.
todd@toolz.uucp (Todd Merriman) (03/27/91)
justicec@handel.cs.colostate.edu (Christopher Justice) writes: >I'm having a problem installing both AT+T System V R3.2.2 and Dos 4.0 on the >same disk drive. >Our computer Vendor is trying to tell us that you can not install unix >and dos on the same drive, or possibly that dos can not take up more than >9% of the drive. I have both DOS and Unix on my 386 system with an Adaptec SCSI controller. DOS uses a 64M partition, and Unix uses ~300M partition. The problems you have described sound more like hardware problems to me. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Todd Merriman - Software Toolz, Inc. * Maintainer of the * * 8030 Pooles Mill Dr., Ball Ground, GA 30107-9610 * Software * * ...emory.edu!toolz.uucp!todd * Entrepreneur's * * V-mail (800) 869-3878, (404) 889-8264 * mailing list * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
zink@panix.uucp (David Zink) (03/29/91)
People keep mentioning the problem with DOS 4 and SCO etc., but so far nobody has mentioned the base problem here. I saw the problem solved once, if you can't figure it out from my vague descriptions mail me (david@jyacc.com) and I will hunt up the guy who actually does this stuff. The problem is that SCO only works with DOS 3.3. Or tries to. You can spoof it, however. Apparently 3.3 added (or didn't add) a boot sector or some such before each DOS partition, and 4.0 does the reverse. Therefor SCO looks a track or so off when trying to find the dos info, and problems arrive. However, DOS stores partition information by head and track, while SCO stores it by absolute sector number. All you have to do is jiggle the numbers by the right values and everything finds the DOS partition where they expect it. [ Note: this means the partition table has conflicting information about partition info. ] There was also a problem with granularity; I believe it was that DOS expects its partitions to be a whole number of tracks and will format to the end of the last track containing the partition. Or some such. Anyway I remember we always had to format the dos partition before installing Xenix (way back when). Dos would otherwise overwrite the start of the Xenix partition. Probably really a granularity problem. Also, since SCO expects 3.3, you can't access big dos partitions. And you can't see more than one from SCO. So we end up formatting the disk: 32M dos partition; 150M BigDos partition; UNIX partitions We have a system in the office formatted that way last summer that is still humming happily away. -- David Zink david@jyacc.com (Work) zink@panix.uucp (Play) Actually this post is so scatter-brained that I'll probably look up the info and post it no matter what. I only post this because a lot of people who could probably figure it all out need the pointers, and I won't be near the office for a while.
zink@panix.uucp (David Zink) (03/31/91)
I had said: > People keep mentioning the problem with DOS 4 and SCO etc., but so > far nobody has mentioned the base problem here. Me and my big mouth! Well, after further research I say: SCO only works with DOS 3.? partitions. These partitions are, of course, all small (under the 32M is it? limit). It will recognize up to 3 such partitions. For best results, these should be the first 3 partitions on the disk. It is probably also wise to make the DOS partitions before making the unix partitions. Format them first to be safe. SCO will recognize a DOS 4.0 partition if it is small and the first partition on the disk. It can be spoofed to recognize up to three DOS 4 (or mixed 4 & 3) partitions if they are all small. Granularity is also an issue. I had assumed DOS had the granularity issues, but it would appear that SCO has it. On the disk I tested the granularity appeared to be one side. It might actually be 16K, as these were the same on the disk in question. Partitions should be organized so that they are divided on granularity boundaries in order for SCO to access them. I don't know if DOS will let you format them not on said boundaries, and I'm not about to try it and find out, thankew ;) To spoof SCO into recognizing second and subsequent DOS 4 partitions: DOS 4 adds a header to the beginning of each partition that is I believe 1 side in size (Might be 32 sectors . . .). DOS reads the Side/Cylinder/Sector table to find the partitions, SCO uses the Absolute sector numbers in the partition table. Therefore, using an appropriate tool (We used NU the norton utility, doing it with NU described in [1]), view the partition table and add one side's worth of sectors to the absolute sector number (remember to subtract the same amount from the size field). Save the changes and SCO should be able to see your partitions. Finally, a few years ago I was involved with a number of Xenix/DOS systems, and we had serious problems with corrupted Xenix Filesystems if we installed Xenix first. I still don't know why this was. Also note that Unix uses BIOS for boot (like it really has a choice). Therefore, any bootable partition must lie within the first N sectors (where N is I believe one million). Note that all that really matters is that /unix lie within the BIOS reachable cylinders. So you can install it and have it work perfectly. Then you or some software product you install (Or some new drivers) relink the kernal, and the new kernal's disk blocks are scattered about . . . . So make the entirety of your root unix partition BIOS reachable! (Usually only an issue if your disk is > 500 M.) -- David Zink david@jyacc.com (Work) zink@panix.uucp (Play) [1] Using NU to spoof SCO: Start up NU, (these are menu choices) Explore Disk, Choose Item, Absolute Sector, Drive C: (Or whatever), Side 0, Cylinder 0, Sector 1, # of Sectors 1 (return), Edit/Modify. This should bring you into the partition table editor. NU mysteriously calls absolute sectors relative sectors. The first Partition should start on Side 1, Cylinder 0, Sector 1. This places it exactly one side from the beginning of the disk. Consequently, in the relative sectors field will be the number of sectors on a side. Remember, the first Dos 4 partition works fine. Usable partitions will probably be labelled 'DOS-16'. If one is labelled 'BIG-DOS' then it will be (mostly) unusable [2]. Scoot over with the arrow keys to the relative sector for the second and/or third DOS-16 partition, and add the number of sectors in a side to that number. Subtract that same value from the # of sectors field and hit return. NOTHING WILL HAPPEN. But, as you exit from NU it will suddenly ask you if you wish to save the changes. (Get cold feet and say no; grumble under your breath;) you should now be able to access the partitions from unix. Do 'dosdir /dev/hd03' remember that the partitions under Unix are numbered in the reverse order from NU or DOS. [2] Accessing BIG-DOS partitions from SCO: Can't be done, except of course that it can, sort of, if you are careful. SCO only cares that the blocks actually accessed are within the first 32K. Therefore, for a one time only thing, it is possible to use a typical disk-compactor or optimizer to force all the files to the start of the partition. Then read-only access is fairly safe. If your compactor will let you place the files you want near the front, then you are in good shape. But don't be surprised if things on the SCO side core-dump a lot. P.S. Since there is a lot of overhead to running multiple partions under DOS, and since we don't need to transfer files that much, we always configure a DOS-16 partition at the start of the disk to use as a transfer area, followed by a BIG-DOS partition, followed by the unix partition(s). --DZ
quimby@madoka.its.rpi.edu (Tom Stewart) (04/01/91)
I believe the problem with DOS corrupting the UNIX file system is that DOS's FDISK tends to write over the first track or two, in addition to writing the new partition table. It's usually a lot safer to use something else to partition the drive. Quimby (mailer disfunctional, replies to: quimby@mts.rpi.edu, quimby@rpitsmts.bitnet)
azakinthinos@lion.uwaterloo.ca (Aris Zakinthinos) (04/01/91)
A friend and I spent a couple of hours one day tring to get SCO unix to accept DOS partitions of > 32k on another friends machine. Well we finally did it. The problem is as follows: If the DOS partition is > 32k the DOS type (this is what we called it it may be really b e called something else) is 6. In the boot up code SCO only checks for DOS types of 4 and 2? (I don't remeber if it is really 2 but it is another number). With the advent of partions of greater 32k Microsoft introducted DOS type 6. The way we got SCO to recognize the >32k partion is to change the comparison of 2 to 6. We don't know if there are any adverse affects to this change but everything seems to be working fine. I don't exactly remember where the boot up code was found (we traced through the boot up process with a debugger) so I can't tell you how to change it but when I go home I will see if I can find the info. The other way we though might work is to simply change the 6 to a 4 in the Master boot track. We didn't go for this option as we don't know what affect this wil have on DOS (if any). Hope this gives some insight. Aris.