SCO OpenServer 5.0.2Dp (maybe others) running inside of vmWare 3.0 (1455)
Marco Mattle
I managed to get a bare-metal installation of SCO OpenServer 5.02Dp
running
inside vmWare 3.0-1455 (the release build) I needed SCO OSR5 for some
odd
reason (old software) and of course no additional machine wasted.
System: Pentium Pro 200 (kinda old)
AHA2940x (alad) host adapter
IDE ATAPI CDROM at 1:0 (SecMaster)
96MB RAM
2 x 2GB SCSI Disks
PS2 Mouse & Keyboard
bare-metal
Boot and install as usual
- alad is builtin
- ide dito
installed a SCO OpenServer 5.0.2Dp (Enterprise) just for the record
let the setup partition the first scsi disk
- installing *blah blah* -
disbaled scologin! vmWare is typically slow thus i decided to disable
it
rebooted into maintenance only
added the 'blc' BTLD via installbtld and my NEW btld disk
*** NOT FROM THE AHS DISK ! IT WONT WORK ! ***
get the Buslogic BTLD off the Mylex FTP
- http://www.mylex.com/products/flashpoint/drivers/
say no to the question about queueing... ( maybe it works if you said
yes I
dunno)
in scoadmin i added a harddisk (option 2 for scsi)
- driver blc
- hba bus lun id all zero (0)
relinked and so on
- the vmware thingy -
I first got frustrated about no root disk found (missed hd bootstring)
set up a new box in vmware
- floppy A:
- SCSI Disc 0:0 - Mode RAW - choose your scsi disk containing your SCO
installation
- IDE/ATAPI CDROM 1:0 - Enabled Raw Access (i already do)
- Briged Network
- Memory 256MB
- Guest System: Other
first time fire up the box
Boot
: defbootstr hd=Sdsk Sdsk=blc(0,0,0)
- NOT! Sdsk=blc(0,0,0,0) the optional BUS zero confuses the loader!!!
it should come up fine
clean the kernel from the 'alad' driver
and add the AMD PCnet driver (my version did prompt it in scoadmin,
Install
'n Go)
what you can NOT use is your floppy... thats the cause why you can't
install
SCO the normal way.
- final steps -
get a VirtualDisk file from what you have made! (and copy it as many
time as
you can :*)
get something bootable that can make disk copies (dd, partition magic,
etc)
in vmWare add another scsi disk (a virual one which is BIGGER than
your raw
disk)
boot up your 'copy system' and raw copy the contents from disk to disk
on the destination server (4x XEON 933Mhz 4 GB Ram) it runs smooth
with the
parameters given, sure it complains about 'register me' because I
didnt do
that yet
hope that helps, and you understood this strange mail
Marco Mattle
PS: Help about the floppy behaviour would be great! it works just
sometimes and thus unrelyable...
Bela Lubkin
Marco Mattle <kor...@gmx.net> wrote:
Ok, I have questions!
You said you have a 2940 host adapter; the "blc" driver doesn't run
that. This must mean that the VMWare folks have chosen the BusLogic
"blc" host adapter as the hardware to emulate, no matter what sort of
SCSI HBA is present in the physical machine. Is that the case?
> - the vmware thingy -
> I first got frustrated about no root disk found (missed hd bootstring)
Right. OpenServer's IDE driver, "wd", tries to do things at the
hardware level that VMWare's IDE hardware emulation doesn't emulate.
I've been working (very slowly) with Heinz Tenschel, sending him "wd"
driver updates that might have a better chance of working in the
emulation environment. So far, no luck. The problem _could_ be solved
by VMWare doing a more complete IDE hardware emulation, but really it's
the fault of the "wd" driver for doing stupid crazy things. It will
probably be fixed eventually. I suspect this is exactly the same issue
that made OpenServer not work on "SoftPC" on Macs, many years ago; there
are probably several other emulation environments that we're similarly
left out of...
> set up a new box in vmware
> - floppy A:
> - SCSI Disc 0:0 - Mode RAW - choose your scsi disk containing your SCO
> installation
> - IDE/ATAPI CDROM 1:0 - Enabled Raw Access (i already do)
> - Briged Network
> - Memory 256MB
> - Guest System: Other
>
> first time fire up the box
> Boot
> : defbootstr hd=Sdsk Sdsk=blc(0,0,0)
> - NOT! Sdsk=blc(0,0,0,0) the optional BUS zero confuses the loader!!!
>
> it should come up fine
> clean the kernel from the 'alad' driver
> and add the AMD PCnet driver (my version did prompt it in scoadmin,
> Install 'n Go)
Ok, so VMWare must provide a BusLogic HBA and an AMD PCnet NIC as
emulated hardware?
> what you can NOT use is your floppy... thats the cause why you can't
> install SCO the normal way.
Not really... on most systems the real stopper is the "wd" IDE driver.
The floppy driver undoubtably has similar issues, needs to stop asking
the hardware to do quite as many crazy stupid things.
> - final steps -
> get a VirtualDisk file from what you have made! (and copy it as many
> time as you can :*)
> get something bootable that can make disk copies (dd, partition magic,
> etc)
> in vmWare add another scsi disk (a virual one which is BIGGER than
> your raw disk)
> boot up your 'copy system' and raw copy the contents from disk to disk
>
> on the destination server (4x XEON 933Mhz 4 GB Ram) it runs smooth
> with the parameters given, sure it complains about 'register me'
> because I didnt do that yet
> PS: Help about the floppy behaviour would be great! it works just
> sometimes and thus unrelyable...
What's the failure mode -- kernel warnings? VMWare messages? Process
accessing the floppy hangs without any messages -- if so, killable or
not? Or does it hang the entire VMWare session, or panic it, or even
bring down the host OS? Also, does it fail during reads? writes?
formatting?
>Bela<
Stuart J. Browne
news:2002030615...@mammoth.ca.caldera.com...
You should be able to tell VMWare to make the CD-ROM drive a SCSI device,
thus bypassing the need to use the wd drivers of SCO at all. You might need
to tell SCO not to probe however.... I'll have to try this . . .
*turns to the system on his right, lost in thought*
I'll post back..
> > set up a new box in vmware
> > - floppy A:
> > - SCSI Disc 0:0 - Mode RAW - choose your scsi disk containing your SCO
> > installation
> > - IDE/ATAPI CDROM 1:0 - Enabled Raw Access (i already do)
> > - Briged Network
> > - Memory 256MB
> > - Guest System: Other
> >
> > first time fire up the box
> > Boot
> > : defbootstr hd=Sdsk Sdsk=blc(0,0,0)
> > - NOT! Sdsk=blc(0,0,0,0) the optional BUS zero confuses the loader!!!
> >
> > it should come up fine
> > clean the kernel from the 'alad' driver
> > and add the AMD PCnet driver (my version did prompt it in scoadmin,
> > Install 'n Go)
>
> Ok, so VMWare must provide a BusLogic HBA and an AMD PCnet NIC as
> emulated hardware?
AMD PCNet, definatly. BusLogic MultiMaster PCI SCSI Host Adapter..
Bela Lubkin
> You should be able to tell VMWare to make the CD-ROM drive a SCSI device,
> thus bypassing the need to use the wd drivers of SCO at all. You might need
> to tell SCO not to probe however.... I'll have to try this . . .
Can you tell VMWare to present an IDE _hard disk_ as SCSI? If so,
OpenServer should be fully usable under VMWare -- just tell it to
present all the IDE peripherals as SCSI.
> *turns to the system on his right, lost in thought*
>
> I'll post back..
Please do. If you have an all-IDE system that you can have VMWare
present as all-SCSI, that would be a good test.
Oh -- for it to be _fully_ usable you would also need the floppy drive
to be virtualized as a SCSI device. OSR506 doesn't have a SCSI floppy
driver, that's going to be new in 5.0.7; but if it can be presented as a
very small SCSI hard disk, you should be able to do most things with it.
> > Ok, so VMWare must provide a BusLogic HBA and an AMD PCnet NIC as
> > emulated hardware?
>
> AMD PCNet, definatly. BusLogic MultiMaster PCI SCSI Host Adapter..
Those must be the simplest hardware designs to emulate, with the added
benefit of low-overhead drivers on the hosted OSes.
>Bela<
Marco Mattle
> "Bela Lubkin" <be...@caldera.com> wrote in message
> news:2002030615...@mammoth.ca.caldera.com...
> > Marco, thanks for this report!
Hope it helps!
My 'real' box has a AHA2940UW so thats about the initial install with
'alad' driver. as mentioned later the vmWare folks emulate a Buslogic
SCSI HBA compatible with the 'blc' driver but not with the old one
from the AHS disk! or I messed with the settings, however.
> > > - the vmware thingy -
> > > I first got frustrated about no root disk found (missed hd bootstring)
> >
> > Right. OpenServer's IDE driver, "wd", tries to do things at the
> > hardware level that VMWare's IDE hardware emulation doesn't emulate.
> > I've been working (very slowly) with Heinz Tenschel, sending him "wd"
> > driver updates that might have a better chance of working in the
> > emulation environment. So far, no luck. The problem _could_ be solved
> > by VMWare doing a more complete IDE hardware emulation, but really it's
> > the fault of the "wd" driver for doing stupid crazy things. It will
> > probably be fixed eventually. I suspect this is exactly the same issue
> > that made OpenServer not work on "SoftPC" on Macs, many years ago; there
> > are probably several other emulation environments that we're similarly
> > left out of...
>
> You should be able to tell VMWare to make the CD-ROM drive a SCSI device,
> thus bypassing the need to use the wd drivers of SCO at all. You might need
> to tell SCO not to probe however.... I'll have to try this . . .
>
I have no problems at all with the 'wd' driver I think I even could
have installed SCO in a pure IDE environment?! the 'no rootdisk'
message came because I missed to let SCO know which hd to mouont
This was the situation in the first boot in vmWare. at this point I
still had BOTH drivers (blc and alad) in the kernel and the kernel
tried to find my scsi drive at a 'alad' hba.
About IDE CDROM emulated as SCSI: I tried serveral settings during my
first stages of brining SCO to life withing vmWare with a floppy &
cdrom install
I always got the message about... hmm
cannot load from installation medium /dev/install
there must be a BIOS problem...
its now safe to reboot *blah*
I suspect (and saw later) that indeed the floppy was asked to serve
/dev/install but vmWare didn't let this happen...
So I never came over this stage and decided to get around this
installation problem by doing it with the real machine (which worked
:*)
I didn't have a bootable CDROM maybe that would have worked...?
definitly worth a try.
> *turns to the system on his right, lost in thought*
>
> I'll post back..
>
> > > set up a new box in vmware
> > > - floppy A:
> > > - SCSI Disc 0:0 - Mode RAW - choose your scsi disk containing your SCO
> > > installation
> > > - IDE/ATAPI CDROM 1:0 - Enabled Raw Access (i already do)
> > > - Briged Network
> > > - Memory 256MB
> > > - Guest System: Other
> > >
> > > first time fire up the box
> > > Boot
> > > : defbootstr hd=Sdsk Sdsk=blc(0,0,0)
> > > - NOT! Sdsk=blc(0,0,0,0) the optional BUS zero confuses the loader!!!
> > >
> > > it should come up fine
> > > clean the kernel from the 'alad' driver
> > > and add the AMD PCnet driver (my version did prompt it in scoadmin,
> > > Install 'n Go)
> >
> > Ok, so VMWare must provide a BusLogic HBA and an AMD PCnet NIC as
> > emulated hardware?
>
> AMD PCNet, definatly. BusLogic MultiMaster PCI SCSI Host Adapter..
AMD PCnet32, the SCSI HBA seems reasonably true :*)
>
> > > what you can NOT use is your floppy... thats the cause why you can't
> > > install SCO the normal way.
> >
> > Not really... on most systems the real stopper is the "wd" IDE driver.
As commented earlier I think the IDE driver works for me for some
reason...
I ONLY have a EIDE cdrom attached as sec master...
> >
> > The floppy driver undoubtably has similar issues, needs to stop asking
> > the hardware to do quite as many crazy stupid things.
> >
Need to test again, got very different results. format OK, format with
lots of errors - write often fails - reading disks works fine until
now.
> > > - final steps -
> > > get a VirtualDisk file from what you have made! (and copy it as many
> > > time as you can :*)
> > > get something bootable that can make disk copies (dd, partition magic,
> > > etc)
> > > in vmWare add another scsi disk (a virual one which is BIGGER than
> > > your raw disk)
> > > boot up your 'copy system' and raw copy the contents from disk to disk
> > >
> > > on the destination server (4x XEON 933Mhz 4 GB Ram) it runs smooth
> > > with the parameters given, sure it complains about 'register me'
> > > because I didnt do that yet
>
> > > PS: Help about the floppy behaviour would be great! it works just
> > > sometimes and thus unrelyable...
> >
> > What's the failure mode -- kernel warnings? VMWare messages? Process
> > accessing the floppy hangs without any messages -- if so, killable or
> > not? Or does it hang the entire VMWare session, or panic it, or even
> > bring down the host OS? Also, does it fail during reads? writes?
> > formatting?
> >
> > >Bela<
I get vmWare Panics (similar to the effect when I try to override the
density under Linux with any other devicefile than the 1.44mb)
formatting 1.44 disks works from time to time, with bugs like
unreadable disk after formatting (but no crash or hang at all)