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From: joeg@starfish.Convergent.COM (Joe Gervais)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: MINIX-386 Boot problem
Message-ID: <1981@starfish.Convergent.COM>
Date: 19 Feb 91 20:48:43 GMT
Organization: Unisys/Convergent, San Jose, CA
Lines: 28

I applied Bruce's mods to my 1.5.10 PH distribution, and after some late night
hours, managed to debug it and get it to boot with shoelace and almost boot
with build/bootblok.  The initial problem I had, so other netters might avoid
it is due to my machine configuration.  I have my memory divided so that the
first 512K is below 1meg and the remaining 3.5M is above 1meg.  Well under
shoelace the system hung when loading fs, and under build, I never got the 
Booting MINIX 1.5... message.  After some investigation and rereading of 
Bruce's readme file (Yes, they are there for a reason), I changed bootblok.s 
to relocate itself to 384K instead of 576K (never, never land in my machine)
and modified include/minix/config.h to reduce the cache from 320K to 128K.
Following this, shoelace loaded completely and appears to work correctly, 
although I have to recompile a bunch more commands to run the test programs
and scripts.

The remaining problem is the boot using the old style boot routines.  I boot
up and load the boot disk correctly.  menu.c then displays the selection menu.
I can change the root device, but once I hit either = or u to continue the boot
Minix panics, giving me a message that there is a fatal error in either kernel,
fs, or mm.  Since I am using identical binaries for these three modules, I
suspect the problem is with the passoff from menu to kernel.  In looking at
cstart.c in the kernel directory, I noticed that new boot methods use an
environment string rather than the structure that is passed from menu.  Has 
anyone encountered this before and is there a fix or something I should look
at, or should I just ignore it and use shoelace rather than the old boot
method?

Joe Gervais
joeg@starfish.convergent.com