Path: tut!enea!mcvax!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!umix!nancy!eecae!upba!unocss!cs002 From: cs002@unocss.UUCP (Stan Wileman) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: minix 1.2 on 3.5" drives. Summary: Minix lives on Z-181s Message-ID: <260@unocss.UUCP> Date: 21 Apr 88 16:39:53 GMT References: <5525@sigi.Colorado.EDU> Organization: U. of Nebraska at Omaha Lines: 249 In article <5525@sigi.Colorado.EDU>, hartzell@boulder.Colorado.EDU (George Hartzell) writes: > I am looking into putting minix on a zenith 183 portable. ... > ... Is it compatible enough or am I wasting my time? Yes, MINIX runs well on the Zenith laptops. I haven't any experience with the Z-183 (with the builtin wini), but my external 20 MB wini on the Z-181 works fine. Now, for the fun part -- getting it there... I moved MINIX from 5.25" to 3.5" diskettes using a procedure that should work for most folks, especially those with both types of drives on the same machine. It involves three steps: 1. Create an MS-DOS file that contains a sector-for-sector image of a MINIX 5.25" floppy. 2. Copy this MS-DOS file to a machine that has 3.5" diskettes. Note that this step is unnecessary if you have both 5.25" and 3.5" drives on the same machine; I don't, so I used a product called the "Brooklyn Bridge" to achieve the transfer; any asynchronous comm. program (Cross- talk, mirror, kermit, etc.) should be usable, but slower than the Bridge. 3. Copy the MINIX disk image from the MS-DOS file sector-for-sector to the 3.5" disk (which was previously formatted). Once you've transferred a boot disk, a root fs, and a /usr fs you should be able to run MINIX on the Z-18?. Note that the disks will be treated as 360K filesystems, but that's okay, since they have at least that much. The floppy driver in 1.2 handles the 3.5"-ers on the Z-181 without difficulty (although I'm certain some parameter-tweaking could result in improved performance :-) You CAN make 720K filesystems by using mkfs and NO SOURCE CODE CHANGES! The only problem I've not found sufficient time to correct is the keyboard encoding; the Z-18? machines use the extra "function" shift key to get some of the codes normally found on a PC's keyboard, and they're encoded in a way that's got my little mind buggered! Incidentally, steps (1) and (3) in the procedure given above were accomplished with a pair of complementary C programs that run under MS-DOS. These were compiled using MS C 4.0, but other compilers should work just as well. GETDI.C ------- /* * Make an image of the diskette in selected disk drive. * The order in which the information is written is * * Side 0, Track 0, Sector 1 ... Sector MAXSEC * Side 1, Track 0, Sector 1 ... Sector MAXSEC * Side 0, Track 1, Sector 1 ... Sector MAXSEC * ... * Side 1, Track MAXTRK, Sector 1 ... Sector MAXSEC * * The output file is always named DISK.ALL */ #include #include #include #define MAXSEC 9 #define MAXTRK 39 union REGS inregs; union REGS outregs; struct SREGS sregs; char buffer[512*MAXSEC]; /* where to place the track copy */ int drive; int trkno, headno; int out; /* output file descriptor */ main() { int ok, tries; inregs.h.ah = 0; /* reset disk system */ int86(0x13, &inregs, &outregs); out = creat("C:DISK.ALL",0666); if (out < 0) { printf("Can't create C:DISK.ALL\n"); exit(1); } close(out); out = open("C:DISK.ALL",O_WRONLY | O_BINARY); if (out < 0) { printf("Can't open C:DISK.ALL\n"); exit(1); } printf("Drive: "); if (scanf("%d",&drive) != 1) exit(0); trkno = 0; headno = 0; printf("Reading track/head "); for (trkno=0;trkno<=MAXTRK;trkno++) for (headno=0;headno<2;headno++) { printf("%2d/%2d\b\b\b\b\b", trkno, headno); ok = 0; tries = 5; while (!ok && tries) { ok = !readtrk(); tries--; } if (ok) savetrk(); else { printf("\nError reading diskette.\n"); exit(1); } } } readtrk() { int i,j; inregs.h.ah = 2; /* read sector */ inregs.h.al = MAXSEC; /* read all of one track */ inregs.h.ch = trkno; /* track 0 */ inregs.h.cl = 1; /* sector 1 */ inregs.h.dh = headno; /* head 0 */ inregs.h.dl = drive; /* drive 0 */ segread(&sregs); /* setup es same as ds */ sregs.es = sregs.ds; inregs.x.bx = buffer; int86x(0x13, &inregs, &outregs, &sregs); /* do it! */ return(outregs.x.cflag); } savetrk() { int i, n; for (i=0;i #include #include #define MAXSEC 9 #define MAXTRK 39 union REGS inregs; union REGS outregs; struct SREGS sregs; char buffer[512*MAXSEC]; /* where to place the track */ int drive; int trkno, headno; int in; /* input file descriptor */ main() { int ok, tries; inregs.h.ah = 0; /* reset disk system */ int86(0x13, &inregs, &outregs); in = open("DISK.ALL",O_RDONLY | O_BINARY); if (in < 0) { printf("Can't open DISK.ALL\n"); exit(1); } printf("Drive: "); if (scanf("%d",&drive) != 1) exit(0); trkno = 0; headno = 0; printf("Writing cylinder/head "); for (trkno=0;trkno<=MAXTRK;trkno++) for (headno=0;headno<2;headno++) { printf("%2d/%2d\b\b\b\b\b", trkno, headno); gettrk(); /* get one track from DISK.ALL */ ok = 0; tries = 5; while (!ok && tries) { ok = !writetrk(); tries--; } if (!ok) { printf("Error writing disk.\n"); exit(1); } } } writetrk() { int i,j; inregs.h.ah = 3; /* write sector */ inregs.h.al = MAXSEC; /* write all of one track */ inregs.h.ch = trkno; /* track number */ inregs.h.cl = 1; /* sector 1 */ inregs.h.dh = headno; /* head number */ inregs.h.dl = drive; /* drive number */ segread(&sregs); /* setup es same as ds */ sregs.es = sregs.ds; inregs.x.bx = buffer; int86x(0x13, &inregs, &outregs, &sregs); /* do it! */ return(outregs.x.cflag); } gettrk() { int i, n; for (i=0;i