Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!sunybcs!ugkamins
From: ugkamins@sunybcs.uucp (John Kaminski)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Protected Mode MINIX & Boot Question
Message-ID: <5103@cs.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 8 Apr 89 20:04:26 GMT
References: <12570@louie.udel.EDU>
Sender: nobody@cs.Buffalo.EDU
Reply-To: ugkamins@sunybcs.UUCP (John Kaminski)
Organization: SUNY/Buffalo Computer Science
Lines: 31

In article <12570@louie.udel.EDU> Leisner.Henr@xerox.com (marty) writes:
>     [ for brevity, some stuff deleted ] 
>
>I also would like to boot in a more conventional way instead of building a
>magic image.
>
>marty
>ARPA:	leisner.henr@xerox.com
>GV:  leisner.henr
>NS:  martin leisner:wbst139:xerox
>UUCP:  hplabs!arisia!leisner

I also have found it would sometimes be useful to start MINIX as a .COM or
.EXE file.  I do agree that it seems easier to contain the system in files,
much like PC-DOS loads the "hidden" files IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM (heck,
if you know how to look, they're not really hidden at all :^).  For me, the
question is whether the boot sector(s?) are large enough to hold clever
enough machine code to be able to find the files properly.

One criticism of mine is the fact that a file system disk, if booted,
generally crashes the machine.  If that's one of the extremely few things
MesSDOS does better, that's one of them.  Although all it does is print
a somewhat stupid message prompting you to insert another disk, I think this
is better than losing control, i.e., executing data (the information in the
superblock).  Since it was admitted in the text that the superblock is big
and therefore able to store a lot of information (that could be calculated
but is put there to do the calculations only once), why not use the space
that way, i.e., make all disks "bootable" (but not necessarily "runnable")?

P.S. -- I have received email from a coupla people saying there are people
working on an Amiga version of MINIX!