Re: Installing vsta-1.6.1 on other than 1st Dos partition?

From: Andy Valencia <vandys_at_nospam.org>
Date: Mon May 11 1998 - 22:01:09 PDT

[magpie@techline.com writes:]

> Dos f: (VSTa; 240Mb available)
>What arguments should I pass to /vsta/boot/dos on the command line (from
>Grub) to establish the root filesystem? Grub accepts these lines:
>...
> module= /vsta/boot/dos -d //disk/wd:wd0_dos0
> -n fs/root (all on one line)

This is the line you'll have to play with.

>The system actually establishes a filesystem (on the wrong partition?), but
>then can't find inittab and 'proc 9 dies'. I think the 'wd0_dos0' is wrong
>for the dos f: partition, but what should it be? I tried reading the source
>files (I am not a software person, alas, but an ex-EE) and have tried some
>guesses: wd0_dos3, wd0_dos6, wd0_p3, wd0_p6 ...but I'm shooting in the
>dark. Time to ask those who know :)

Now, these are all partitions on the FIRST IDE disk, right? Because we'll
have to start playing with "wd1_*" stuff if not.

Replace the last "/vsta/boot/init" line with "/vsta/boot/testsh", and now
you should drop into a little shell environment (if your DOS server bombs
and drops you into the kernel debugger, just "q" and you'll be back to the
running system, sans DOS filesystem, but that's OK). Now do:

% mount disk/wd /wd
% cd /wd
% ls
(You should see the WD partitions)

You can then do ^Z (control-Z) to get back to the kernel debugger, and then
"reboot".

Hopefully this'll give you an idea of what DOS partitions can be found.
Note that VSTa does not understand compressed drives, nor FAT-32 (actually,
FAT-32 wouldn't be hard to add, but I just can't find time these days).
Also, if your drive's using a pseudo-geometry (i.e, how Windows numbers the
tracks does not match the natural geometry reported by the controller--this
is common for disks above 1 gigabyte in size), it's easy for the filesystem
to be incomprehensible to VSTa. The most common sympton of this is for the
partition to be there, but the DOS server takes one look at it and exits in
abject terror.

                                                Andy Valencia
Received on Mon May 11 18:19:06 1998

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