Re: Dual Boot NextStep, OpenStep

[Pascal Bourguignon]

NeXTSTEP  can  work  with two  kind  of  partition  tables :  the  BSD
partition tables  and the MS-DOS partition tables.   fdisk manages the
MS-DOS partition tables.  If fdisk does not report any partition, then
it means that your disk has a BSD partition table.  With BSD partition
tables, NeXTSTEP  can work  with one or  two partitions, no  more. See
disk(8).


Now the  fdisk of  NeXTSTEP is  quite limited.  I  would use  fdisk of
Linux to  make the partitions,  and install LILO  or grub to  boot and
select the partition/system to boot from.

NeXTSTEP can  only access  at most  7 partitions per  disk (each  2 GB
max).


> From: Richard van Paasen <rvpaasen@dds.nl>
>
> I encountered some weird behaviour, read on ...
> 
> Stefan Böhringer wrote:
> 
> >It is unusual that you do not see any partitions but depending on your
> >disk size this may be due to different CHS-mappings comparing Linux with
> >NS/OS.
> >
> That seems to be a problem on my machine. The fdisk output for the disk 
> on which OpenStep is running is listed below: there are no partitions in 
> use and the drive size differs according to the drive and bios. I tried 
> to change the bios settings from LBA to NORMAL and LARGE mapping of CHS 
> parameters, but that doesn't work: OpenStep can't boot then because the 
> boot loader cannot find the config files. The same behaviour is shown 
> for the NextStep disk.
> 
> Anyway, I can mount the NextStep harddisk from OpenStep (it was already 
> mounted for me on /Disk). Using this, I edited the fstab file on the 
> NextStep disk and set the mountpoint of / to /dev/hd1a. This way 
> NextStep should be able to boot from the second harddisk with the 
> correct root partition.
> 
> After rebooting, I typed the following on the boot prompt:
> 
>     hd(1,1)mach_kernel rootdev=/dev/hd1a
> 
> But... as I already suspected, the boot loader responds that the 
> partition is invalid. It however continues loading after 3 retries. Then 
> it continues in diagnostic mode,  and low and behold, after a few 
> seconds I see NextStep coming up!!!
> 
> This puzzles me, did the boot loader start the correct kernel? Maybe it 
> started the kernel from the OpenStep partition with the NextStep root 
> partition! How can I tell?
> 
> Richard.
> 
> 
> FDISK OUTPUT in OPENSTEP
> ======================================================
> OpenStep:3# fdisk
> NeXT fdisk v1.02
> 
> Device: /dev/rhd0h
> No partitions in use
> 
>    Unused Blocks     Start   Size
>    -------------------------------
>    Free Space           0     812
> 
> Fdisk main menu
> ----------------
> 1) Create a new partition
> <...>
> 6) Save changes and quit
> 
> Enter 1-6: 4
> 
> Partition Table
> ----------------
>   Act  H  S Cyl   Id   H  S Cyl     Begin      Size
>   ---  -  - ---   --   -  - ---     -----      ----
>    0   0  0   0    0   0  0   0         0         0
>    0   0  0   0    0   0  0   0         0         0
>    0   0  0   0    0   0  0   0         0         0
>    0   0  0   0    0   0  0   0         0         0
> 
> 
> Disk Information
> -----------------
> Disk statistics according to device driver and bios:
>     device: 813 Megabytes, 1665216 sectors
>     bios:   812 Megabytes, 1663200 sectors
>         cylinders = 825, heads = 32, sectors/track = 63
> 
> Press Return to continue
> 


-- 
__Pascal_Bourguignon__                   http://www.informatimago.com/
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