How to spoil a perfectly good week-end

Take two guys, tired after a long week of both studies and work. Take an otherwise perfectly good week-end, put in a tiny computer called Victor Vicky <specs>. Finish up with a fix idea about installing Minix on it and you are halfway there. :)

You might ask yourself; "What is Minix and why do they want to try to install and run it on an old i8088 with 30 megs of RLL harddrive and 512 kilobytes worth of RAM?" - We did too! :-)

All we can say about that is that it is far beyond the scope of this document! You will have to dig deep into the shelves at your local library to find behavioural studies that can begin to explain this kind of odd anomaly. Especially when you consider the year in wich all this took place!

It was the year of our lord nineteenninetynine, it was winter and somehow JAkov^H^H^H^Hakob had got hold of an old beaten up PC XT computer. The excitement was complete and we both knew that we had to do something exceptional with it. It deserved all our attention, just as another adventure with a Sparc-clone called ICL DRS/6000 that took place earlier.

Somehow we could both feel the power of the old Vicky calling us in our sleep. We began brainstorming and as usual JAkov had a lot of crazy ideas on how and what. But we soon came to the conclusion that it would be so cool to put Minix on it, install a very small webserver and put it on the Internet... Other ideas amongst many was to install FreeDOS, ELKS or ____________

On the following bytes below you will be able to find out more about the specifics of the project and some comments on life and generally speaking very confused remarks that could be heard by my neighbours in the middle of the night.

Installation Jazz

To start off you need a copy of the Minix operating system. Follow the install instructions for a general install and how to get the install, usr and boot floppies. Note the separate sections for the different Intel processors.

Pay no attention to the warnings on the home page. Minix can actually be installed on a very thin hardware base - It just takes a little more effort and perhaps a piece of your sanity before you figure out how your hardware actually functions. :)

Specifications

• One old beaten up Victor Vicky consisting of:
  • Intel i8088 processor @4.72 MHz.
  • 30 MB RLL HDD Seagate ST-238R
  • MFM HDD controller.
  • 512 kB of RAM,
  • One of those charming 5¼" 320 kB drives.
  • Of course no nifty BIOS Setup program...
• A small "backup" PC AT-computer with:
  • a real 3½" floppy drive.
  • an extra power supply.
  • a nifty AWARD BIOS setup program.

Problems

Vi hade också stora problem med att få över vettigt data
till 320 kb drive, hade vi.
Vi lyckades till slut _förstå_ att det var 320 och inte
360 tex.
Sen så stoppade vi ju faktiskt i en MFM-kontro. i din pentium
med tillhörande HD.
(efter att kompilerat om kärnan med stöd för mfm.)
med planen att fixa ihop filsystemet från din datan.
men ditt bios ville då boota från xt-disk eller ngt annat
sjukt.
jo, just det. det urgamla xt-bioset på kontrollern tog
över en hel del.
Var det inte mer tok?
Överföring av filer medelst annan datan med minix och dubbla
drivar och grejs.
o saker.

Jakov:

Tried booting from floppy and mounting HD to no avail. Reason: AT thinks drive is 20MB. It is 30 MB. Only WD-clone controller in Victor understands it is 30 MB. And thus refuses to recognize wrong 20 MB formatting.

Work-around: Reformat (low level) using ROM:ed program on Victor HD controller. How do you start it?

1. Boot DOS.
2. Run debug.
3. use 'g' command to jump into code in ROM.

Bizarre comments

Jakovs comments:

• Last thought before falling asleep second night: "What do Minix do when "mounting" usr partition spread out over several floppy disks? Reading into RAM? No, there is no RAM left for such extravaganza!"
• installboot -m /dev/$primary /usr/mdec/masterboot >/dev/null ||exit.

Jokkes bright reflexion: