Subject: Re: Unsuccessful attempt on 1.2 beta scratch-installation
To: None <sabell@ARGONET.CO.UK>
From: Kim G. S. \yhus <kim@pvv.ntnu.no>
List: port-arm32
Date: 08/11/1996 18:50:48
> >I tried to use my Acorn SCSI card with my HP C3325A SCSI drive.
> >This drive was formatted 400 MB to RISC OS.
> >
> >I am very persistant, and I this refuse to install it to an IDE drive
> >first as I did the first time I installed RiscBSD. As a matter of 
> >fact, I do not even have a suitable IDE drive for RiscBSD. The
> >210 MB I have is my boot disc, and too small for RiscBSD anyway.
> 
> But you could put a boot partition on it, and put most other RiscBSD stuff on
> the SCSI drive? Surely the nature of beta releases is that we may have to
> compromise a little on our ideal solutions, in order to get things running?

That is a totally unnecessary complication. I am quite sure there
are quite a lot of people that dont use RiscBSD because they
dont want the risk of repartition their harddisk, which probably
is full anyway. The second IDE slot is probably used up by a
CD-ROM.

The natural thing is to buy an SCSI disk for NetBSD, which use
SCSI disks on the other systems anyway. I bought an optical PD.

> >Unfortunately, bb_riscbsd is using the logical data that filecore
> >reports, and RiscBSD itself is using the physical.
> 
> The fundamental problem seems to be the use of a SCSI drive to boot RiscBSD.
> If this is the case, it needs addressing, but in the final analysis hardly
> justifies the opening paragraphs of the original posting.

You cant do development on the pitifully small IDE disks which
are in common use.

And what about me: I work professionally as a unix system administrator,
and know perfectly well how to develop unix programs, yet with NetBSD
on the RiscPC, I cant get anything done, and i have mounted on
a partitioned IDE drive. The reason? I dont have a HD on my
cumana scsi card. I have an optical PD instead. This makes the
boot sequence crash. Programming like that sucks.

However, I could rewrite it myself if I could boot and compile, which
I cant. The chicken and egg problem.

Kim0