Re: Umsdos support?

[Gertjan Klein <gklein@xs4all.nl>]

Giuliano Procida <gpp10@cus.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

 > It is possible to fool the installation process roughly as follows:

 > You need a DOS partition, say /dev/hda1, umssync, and perhaps other
 > things (it's been a while). Replace the boot-floppy kernel with one
 > that has FAT and UMSDOS compiled in.

  Ah, you make it sound so easy ;-)  I can't seem to get this right. I
copy the kernel to the file linux and run ./rdev.sh. This script tries
to run "rdev /mnt/linux /dev/ram0" - and there is no /dev/ram0. Why does
the script ask for something Debian doesn't supply? Anyway, if I ignore
this error or run the command manually with /dev/ram (which I do have),
and boot the floppy, it stops here:

RAMDISK: compressed image found at block 0
VFS: Mounted root (minix filesystem)
Root is mounted from /dev/ram
/etc/rc done.

And then it just sits there. I can get a shell at Alt-F2, but obviously
something must be wrong so I didn't try going any further. What could
cause this?  The other instructions you gave seem easy enough to follow,
but unfortunately I didn't get that far :-(

 >> Unfortunately, after a message of VFS: Mounted umsdos
 >> filesystem as root (or similar), the system hangs in an endless loop
 >> continuously reading the harddisk.

 > You seem to have got most of the way. What messages does it give?

  Just that. Perhaps this was caused by the remounting in
/etc/init.d/boot? I didn't know I had to change that. In the mean time I
deleted the test harddisk partition so I can't easily try again.

 > As an alternative, you could try my modifications to the boot-floppies
 > package to handle UMSDOS installs. There has just been a new
 > boot-floppies release, so I'll have do some merging before I have a
 > proper set of patches ready. Have a look at
 > ftp://pootle.magd.cam.ac.uk/ if you are interested (patches against
 > boot-floppies 1.2.5).

  My mirror doesn't carry 1.2.5, only 1.2.4. It seems there's some stuff
specific to your system in the patch (I saw some copying of loadlin);
was I too early downloading it?

 > In your other message you mentioned a ZIP drive, can't you format a
 > disk as ext2? Or is that not a possibility for you?

  Not really. I want Debian to run from the ZIP disk so I can take it to
my father's place and run Linux there. This way, I don't need a special
boot floppy, or files on his harddisk. I just insert the ZIP disk and
get Linux. This is only possible using umsdos. (I am a bit surprised,
actually, that Debian doesn't support installation to umsdos).

  Thanks for your help,
  Gertjan.

-- 
Gertjan Klein <gklein@xs4all.nl>
The Boot Control home page: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gklein/bcpage.html


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