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From: n0ano@wldrdg.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: MINIX on the Zenith 150
Message-ID: <129@wldrdg.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 6-Apr-87 12:20:30 EST
Article-I.D.: wldrdg.129
Posted: Mon Apr  6 12:20:30 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 11-Apr-87 07:27:03 EST
Organization: Wildridge Consulting,  Boulder, CO
Lines: 32

This posting is an account of my experience in putting MINIX
on a Zenith 150.  My Zenith is an IBM PC/XT clone with a single
floppy and a 10 Mbyte hard disk.

The good news is the MINIX works just fine on the floppy.  I
followed the instructions and every thing worked exactly as
advertised.

The bad news is the hard disk.  The hard disk works fine as a
read-only device.  It dies when you try to write to it.  The fun
part is that it doesn't die immediately.  You write a random number
of blocks and then the disk driver fails to write a block, trys to
reset the disk, fails to get the proper status back from the reset
and so the disk driver goes into a loop constantly resetting the
disk.

I've sliced my disk up into four partitions.  Partition 1 (6 Mbytes)
is used for MS/DOS, Partition 2 (3 Mbytes) will be used for MINIX, and
Partitions 3 & 4 (374 Kbytes) are for general utility.  What I did
was write an MS/DOS program that copied the MINIX /usr file system
to Partition 4 and I now use Partition 4 as the /usr file system when
I boot MINIX.

Using this scheme I've successfully re-created the MINIX kernel from
the sources provided.  The kernel created under MINIX works but it is
about 6 Kbytes bigger than the kernel distributed by P-H (the boot
image size goes from 89K to 96K).  Looks like the PC/IX C compiler
is a little more efficient than the MINIX one.

Don Dugger
Wildridge Consulting
nbires!onecom!wldrdg!n0ano