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Creating a bootable A/UX Zip Disk

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Aaron Sawdey

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May 7, 1996, 3:00:00 AM5/7/96

to stu...@clark.net

A couple of people have requested this, and since it's not large, I'll
post it.

Instructions for making a Zip disk that contains all that is needed to
boot a stripped-down A/UX system. My hardware is:
Quadra 700 w/ 20MB RAM
A/UX 3.0 (Apple seems to have gone to great lengths to make
upgrading a pain, and my system works fine so why
mess with it?)
240MB internal drive (A/UX root, swap, and MacOS partitions)
540MB external drive (/usr/local, more MacOS space)
Apple CD 300
Zip drive

1) Use APS 2.7.3 to make a zip disk with a 3M MacOS partition, a swap
partition (I used 8M even though I have 20M of RAM because I didn't
want to take up the whole zip disk for swap -- after all I'm just
using it for an emergency disk) and the rest as an a/ux root+usr
partition (which should be slice 0).

2) Put a system folder and the a/ux macos boot stuff on the 3M
mac partition (I installed a minimal system 7.0.1).

3) Under A/UX, put in /etc/fstab and /etc/disktab entries for the zip
disk. Here's my /etc/disktab entry for the zip disk:

#
# Zip 100MB
#
ZIP100|IOMEGA ZIP 100MB:ty=winchester:ns#98:nt#2:nc#1024

And my /etc/fstab entry for it:

/dev/dsk/c5d0s0 /zip 4.2 rw,noauto 0 0

4) If your zip drive is at scsi 5, make a filesystem with:
"newfs /dev/rdsk/c5d0s0 ZIP100"
Then you should be able to do "fsck /dev/rdsk/c5d0s0"
and then "mkdir /zip" and "mount /zip". Now the filesystem should be
available as /zip.

5) Carefully look over the setup.sh script included in this post
and make sure it agrees with how your system is set up (scsi ID for
the zip drive). This is a modified version of the "emergency
partition" stuff I got off of jagubox.gsfc.nasa.gov (emerg.tar).
Run it and it will copy a whole bunch of stuff over to the
zip disk, and make a kernel over there.

6) Then, if you don't have a device at scsi 6, you should be able to
reboot your mac and hold down Delete-Option-Command-Shift (DOCS)
to boot from your zip drive. Then launch the a/ux startup program
and it should boot a/ux from your zip drive.

Of course this requires an a/ux system to make, and it is a minimal
a/ux system, but there is room to add more stuff, I think. I use my
a/ux zip boot disk as a place to store about 50MB of backup files,
which is why I keep it very minimal. I just wanted to make sure I
could still boot a/ux even if my normal boot disk got screwed up.

begin 664 emerg.new.tar.gz
<uuencoded_portion_removed>
'+K;= % -!

end

-- Aaron

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