How To Install Minix 3 on a bare metal hard drive myself without the installer

[Daniel Morgan]

How do you put Minix 3 on a hard drive without using the Minix installer from the iso?

Not virtual here, but bare metal.  A real computer with real hardware.

Minix uses its minix 3 file system.  So, this would need to be formatted in a partition that Mnix could find.  Copy the files.  Set the root password. Add an initial non super user and password, set the time zone, network configuration, setup a default X config, etc...

I just realized, I should just try to find the source to the Minix installer.

The sad part is I do not have a CD/DVD drive in my Thinkpad.  And the drive is SATA and another drive is NVMe SSD.   I have 3 USB ports that I can stick USB sticks in.  The BIOS can be set to legacy instead of UEFI.  i can press F12 when it starts to select a drive to boot fom.   Yet, Minix does not support of any of that if I want to install on bare metal.  So, I would have to get that these devices working in Minix first.  But how can I install it to test it unless I got the devices working.  Kind of a chicken and egg problem.  How would you handle this situation?  Buy another computer that has IDE disk drives with a CD-ROM drive?  Then build and developer on it?   Do computers come with IDE drives these days?

Thanks,

Daniel

[Jeremy Harden]

I installed MINIX 3 using an old Acer with a single core 32bit x86 and a 70gig IDE HDD.  The installer is very straight forward.  I would definitely just buy an old beater of a 32bit laptop and install from there (Thinkpad T60 would be your best bet due that most UNIX's do install very well on a Thinkpad due to experience although anecdotal).  USB out of the gate is not really supported on MINIX 3, unless it registers with your bios (ie USB Mouse, maybe even USB flashdrive as boot and USB cdrom).

[Jeremy Harden]

If getting the T60, I think it uses SATA, so I would try using the AHCI install process.

[Daniel Morgan]

I am talking about how to install on a bare metal hard drive without the installer.

But i saw in an old thread on this group where someone pointed to installation scripts.

The idea is to install minix on a different partition on the hard drive from the partition I am using.  But Minix also installs boot images on the root partition.  When I have multiple partitions with Debian Linux installed, I usually use a live debian linux dvd and then use grub to install.  However, when computer boots, grub allows changes to its configuration.

Linux From Scratch book explains something like this for building and installing Linux manually yourself - you create another partition, format it, build linux,  copy the files over to the new partition, etc...  

But I am not sure if Minix boot can handle multiple Minix partitions on a hard disk.

[Josh Noe]

You could run the installer in a vm and then use dd to copy the partitions onto your hard drive. There are build scripts you can use to accomplish the same thing, but I seem to remember them being poorly documented. I think there is a thread here somewhere that gives better examples than the wiki, but it's been a long time so I'm not 100% sure.