Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!uwmcsd1!leah!emb978 From: emb978@leah.Albany.Edu (Eric M. Boehm) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: MINIX and harddisk Summary: Hard disk and root file system Keywords: Can Minix run on harddisk partition like Xenix/DOS? Message-ID: <984@leah.Albany.Edu> Date: 8 Sep 88 22:49:08 GMT References: <285@mjbtn.MFEE.TN.US> Organization: The University at Albany, Computer Services Center Lines: 26 In article , hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) writes: > At least in 1.3 (I don't know 1.2) you can put all but the boot floppy > on hard disk. You need three partitions. Partition 1 would be DOS, > partition 2 would be Minix /usr, and partition 3 would be Minix root. > If you leave the boot floppy in the drive when you hit =, rather than > putting in the root floppy, Minix tries to load the RAM disk from a > file system on partition 3. So you put root there. Of course you > have to modify /etc/rc to mount /dev/hd2 as /usr rather than asking > the user to insert the floppy. Once you've done this, to boot DOS > you reboot with no floppy in the drive. To boot Minix you reboot > with the Minix boot floppy in the drive. This is slightly inaccurate, at least for version 1.3. Following instructions someone else posted, I was able to put the root file system on the hard disk. This is (in my opinion) much better because /tmp is now on the hard disk. I was having quite a few problems with patch running out of temp disk space. If I increased the size of the RAM disk, then I got out of memory errors. You could put the boot on the hard disk. I did not do so because my particular hardware will not let me boot from more than 1 partition. However, with three partitions, you could have DOS on partition 1, root file system on partition 2, and boot on partition 3. As far as I can tell (I have not verified this), you should be able to put the boot on partition three a la "build bootblok fs mm kernel init fsck /dev/hd3" Eric M. Boehm EMB978@ALBNY1VX.BITNET EMB978@LEAH.ALBANY.EDU