Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari!otc!metro!ipso!runx!brucee
From: brucee@runx.ips.oz (Bruce Evans)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: MINIX and harddisk
Message-ID: <1738@runx.ips.oz>
Date: 13 Sep 88 11:45:40 GMT
References: <285@mjbtn.MFEE.TN.US> <3490003@hpisoa1.HP.COM>
Reply-To: brucee@runx.OZ (Bruce Evans)
Organization: RUNX  Un*x Timeshare. Sydney, Australia.
Lines: 21

Andrew Valencia writes:

>in the h/ directory.  Changing ROOTDEV to the hard disk partition, and
>chopping out the floppy-to-rootdev copy results in a very nice root partition
>on hard disk, with a much faster boot.

Yes, there's little more to do than changing ROOTDEV. I made ROOTDEV a
_variable_ and arranged for the boot program to initialize it interactively
at boot time. Much the same was done for the root image device (BOOTDEV?)
which still gets used if ROOTDEV is /dev/ram, and the RAM disk size which
may no longer be determined from the image. Actually, I soon got tired of
typing the device names and changed Marty Leisner's boot-from-DOS build.c
to set them up from a DOS batch file.  This allows the image to be kept in
pieces for convenient testing of different versions, and booting from both
hard and floppy disks almost as transparently as using a bootstrap loader.
A Minix-only version version remains to be done.

These changes are hard to extract from others in my kernel ...

Bruce Evans
Internet: brucee@runx.ips.oz.au    UUCP: uunet!runx.ips.oz.au!brucee