Installing AROS (x86) to HD?

[cgutjahr]

I recently got a very old laptop (486DX@100) and tried to boot Matt Parsons' AROS distribution, which worked fine.

Now I'd like to install AROS to the HD, but there's absolutely no documentation available. I know how to handle FDISK, and I'm an expert with HDToolbox.

Would be cool if somebody could give me a basic step by step guide to installing AROS to HD.

Also, does anybody know if there's any traffic on the AROS users mailing list? They don't have public archives.

Thanks in advance.

[Ogun]

Did you download the floppy version or the CDRom version? I want to know simply so I can write a small document on how to do this.

Will be a new experience for me as well, even though I am one of the people responsible for ide.device and trackdisk.device

Regards,
  Johan

... why does not start Aros on my
thinkpad t23 ?
the boot stop when Aros  try to clean memory...
anybody knows!?  :-?
thanks and regards,

rky

[Ogun]

@RKY:
Most likely it has not crashed. It is just taking a very long time to complete. This can happen if you have a lot of memory or the BIOS in your machine does not configure the MTRR correctly.

Have you tried waiting a couple of minutes?

This obviously needs fixing.

//Johan

.. ok, i'll try to wait more...
 :-)

[bloodline]

cgutjahr wrote:
I recently got a very old laptop (486DX@100) and tried to boot Matt Parsons' AROS distribution, which worked fine.

Now I'd like to install AROS to the HD, but there's absolutely no documentation available. I know how to handle FDISK, and I'm an expert with HDToolbox.

Would be cool if somebody could give me a basic step by step guide to installing AROS to HD.

Also, does anybody know if there's any traffic on the AROS users mailing list? They don't have public archives.

Thanks in advance.

Did you send me an Email about that laptop? I assume my advice got it working then, that 's good.

I have installed AROS onto a Hard disk, you need to use HDToolBox in AROS not Fdisk. As Johan has already said there are a few problem with the ide.device at the moment, I found it was better to create the disk using a real Amiga and then plug it into an PC and boot AROS, then copy the CD to the Hard drive.
Run "install-pc386" (or some such name, but it doesn't seem to work at this time anyway) and the disk is bootable.

Wait until Johan has been able to spend a bit more time on this area.

[cgutjahr]

@Ogun:

Did you download the floppy version or the CDRom version? I want to know simply so I can write a small document on how to do this.

The floppy version.

Will be a new experience for me as well, even though I am one of the people responsible for ide.device and trackdisk.device

;-)

@bloodline:

Did you send me an Email about that laptop? I assume my advice got it working then, that 's good.

Yes, that was me. Thanks again.

I have installed AROS onto a Hard disk, you need to use HDToolBox in AROS not Fdisk. As Johan has already said there are a few problem with the ide.device at the moment, I found it was better to create the disk using a real Amiga and then plug it into an PC and boot AROS, then copy the CD to the Hard drive.

Huh? How's that supposed to work? I want to boot from the HD, my Laptop's BIOS certainly doesn't know how to handle RDB disks, therefore I assumed that I had to prepare the HD with FDisk and install some sort of Bootmanager which loads the kernel?

Run "install-pc386" (or some such name, but it doesn't seem to work at this time anyway) and the disk is bootable.

Wait until Johan has been able to spend a bit more time on this area.

I would need a nit of patience for that ;-)

[bloodline]

Huh? How's that supposed to work? I want to boot from the HD, my Laptop's BIOS certainly doesn't know how to handle RDB disks, therefore I assumed that I had to prepare the HD with FDisk and install some sort of Bootmanager which loads the kernel?

Sebastian has been really clever and managed to get the PC to Boot RDB disks. You have to use his special install program in the C dir. Which puts Grub
(our boot loader) at the begining of the drive.

I'm sure he will explain how it works if you Email him.

[jdiffend]

I think it might be a good idea to include the install docs with the next distos.

[Ogun]

Johan has been really clever and managed to get the PC to Boot RDB disks. You have to use his special install program in the C dir. Which puts Grub

Uhm, that was actually Sebastian Heutling that wrote those things, together with HDToolbox and our FFS implementation. I merely write hardware drivers.

I am not completely sure if our customized GRUB understands RDBs either, but we shall certainly have a look at that.

[Ogun]

I think it might be a good idea to include the install docs with the next distos.

Well, this is where I would like to point out that harddisk installations of AROS is highly experimental at this stage. I would call it Alpha. High risk of nuking things on the harddisk. As a matter of fact I just found a neat little bug in ide.device causing geometries to be faulty. Currently working on making it deal with disks larger than 8.3 Gb as well.

[bloodline]

jdiffend wrote:
I think it might be a good idea to include the install docs with the next distos.

As I've clearly written on my site, I don't plan to release any info about HD installing until I can be confident that it works well enough.
By that time I hope to have an automatic installer program ready.

[jdiffend]

As I've clearly written on my site, I don't plan to release any info about HD installing until I can be confident that it works well enough.

Include docs that warn people it is an alpha version that will certainly crash, destroy data and to use it at their own risk.
Tell them they should only install it on a system by itself and they will certainly have to reinstall in the future.

[N7VQM]

jdiffend wrote:
Include docs that warn people it is an alpha version that will certainly crash, destroy data and to use it at their own risk.

Hmm...I think I was just say "Don't do it, yet!" if I were them.  Making low level changes to an IDE drive, especially and older one can render that drive completely useless if something isn't quite right.  No more smoke and mirrors. Even SCSI drives are immune.  

I don't know why, but I just had to register so I could add my two cents to this thread.  This latest release of AROS is very impressive!! It REALLY makes me want to install it to a partition on my HD (I already have Debian and win98, but having AROS would just be the best).

However, this thread certainly scares me! Guess I'll wait until the developers have a little more confidence in the process ...

Thanks,  for developing AROS