[TUHS] Re: Making boot disks

[Pete Turnbull]

On Oct 1, 10:16, Ian Molton wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Oct 2002 06:29:56 GMT
> pete at dunnington.u-net.com (Pete Turnbull) wrote:

> > It is indeed a straight port of BSD 4.x, where x depends in whether is
> > it's RISC iX 1 or 1.2 (R440 used 4.2, I think; R260 used 4.3).
>
> was the only difference between 1 and 1.2 the kernel?

I think other things were updated as well, in line with differenet versions
of BSD, but I don't have any sort of definitive list.

> > Take a look at James Carter's page at
> > http://www.jfc.org.uk/documents/riscix_clone.html
>
> wont I need a working installation first?

To clone a disk, yes, you need to start with a good disk :-)

> > > is it possible for someone else to make a filesystem image for me
> > > that I could dd onto a floppy? I suspect that this system uses an
> > > old variant of ufs.
> >
> > It is a standard 4.3 filesystem (at least for the verison for an
> > R260).  It even says so when it boots:
>
> Thats good to know - linux can actually write to that (although attempts
> so far have led to kernel panics!)
>
> Do you know of generic source for mkfs ?

Linux source, especially early versions, or a full BSD 4.x distribution, eg
from the PUPS archive?

> > One of us could copy some stuff for you.  I'm not sure you'd be able
> > to get what you need onto a single floppy, though.  That's not how
> > Acorn did it.
>
> did you see the scripts I attached?
>
> Apparently the create 3 floppies, which can be used to install a system.

I've looked at the scripts (sorry, didn't have time yesterday).  They're
not Acorn's.  They were created by Granada Microcare's Field Service
division when they had to upgrade R140 versions of RISC iX -- 1.13 was a
bugfix release.

They should work, providing the versions of the kernel and other files in
my version will fit on a floppy.  I'm not sure how best to get your tar
file back though; it doesn't look like the minimal system has NFS support.
 You ought be able to do it if you had a spare hard drive, put the tar file
on it, and mount it under /mnt.  Modify the tar command in cpsys so it
doesn't overwrite /mnt, like James and I did.

dsplit is just a utility (written by Acorn?) to split a big file over
several floppies, or extract it again (like bsplit, but probably with
different markers).

> can risciX do loopback mounted filesystems?)

No.  That's a linux invention.  But I can probably create the floppies for
you, when I have time to move my R260 to somewhere I can use it -- probably
not this weekend, maybe the weekend after.

What machine have you got?  R140, R260, or something else?  Is it the same
type as the filesystem you copied came from?

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Network Manager
						University of York