Hello Minixers,
I ftp'd the minix 1.5 demo disk with the intention of trying it
out on my (underpowered) PC at home. It is a generic clone 286 with
1MB RAM (640K, 384K), Hercules graphics, and an 80MB disk.
Well, I got the binary file (demon_dsk.ibm), the documentation,
and rawrite.exe. I then downloaded (in binary mode) this stuff to a directory on my PC's hard drive. I then formatted a 360K 5 1/4 inch
disk and ran rawrite. I supplied rawrite with the filename (demo_dsk.ibm) and the disk to write on (A:). It processed through the file and finished with no errors. So then I <Ctrl-Alt-Del> rebooted with my new minix demo boot floppy.
It started up with something like:
'Booting Minix 1.5 (c) 1991 Prentice-Hall'
Then a couple of seconds of floppy-reading... Then:
'Read error - Automatic reboot'
And it started booting over again. It keeps doing this forever. Yuck :(
I thought since it was a read error maybe the diskette was bad. So I formatted another and went through the rawrite process again. Rebooted and still the same problem.
I'd appreciate any ideas and/or suggestions you kind net.people can come
up with. My goal in trying all this is to see if it is feasible to run
Minix on my woefully underpowered PC at home. If it works and isn't TOO slow, I'm going to get the 'full' version from Prentice-Hall.
Help! :)
Grant
Grant Totten, Programmer/Analyst, Trent University, Peterborough Ontario GTotten@TrentU.CA Phone: (705) 748-1653 FAX: (705) 748-1246 ======================================================================== Death is Nature's way of recycling human beings.
"First off, thanks to the kind people who helped me with my booting
problem with the Minix demo disk. All works well now - I just had to
format a disk for the 'native' mode of my 5 1/4" floppy, namely 1.2Mb
and *NOT* 360K."
On the off chance that anyone still monitors this group, I thought
I'd post and see if anyone remembers the details of that fix.
It's a lot of time that I heard of Minix 1.5!!!
I can only remember that Minix1.5 went on 5"1/4 floppies formatted for
360K that still lie in a box on a shelf at home. And as I remember
Minix 1.5 can only handle that format.
I think that what Grant says is that using the original format couldn't
boot but it had to copy the images on a 1.2M floppy. Maybe because of
its floppy drive, having problems with a the 360K format.
Next problem… why does mkfs trash the partition table every time I
run it? To the source mobile! Good thing I have lots of free time
just now!
BTW, my virtual 286 MINIX system now has two 20MB hard disks that are working! For some reason, MINIX does not seem to like the partition
tables made by MINIX fdisk. I used the old Ranish "Partition Manager"
DOS program to fix the hard disk images. MINIX mkfs seems to zero the bootblock (not sure why that is) but I have rebooted several times
and the filesystems are still there. So... progress! :)
Hello Minixers,
28 years later, I'm having the exact same problem, trying to get MINIX
1.5 to boot on the PCem emulator. Searching with google, this old
thread is the ONLY thing that comes up about this!
I see from this other post
( https://groups.google.com/forum/#! msg/comp.os.minix/Cm72kXon9xs/LPhh7ABKBYEJ )
that Grant eventually got it to work, but not too many details are
provided:
If you cannot find my boot-sector fix, let me know and I will check
my private archives.
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