What a mistake it was! I have lost several hours trying to figure out cpio header errors coming from the disk… By pure coincidence, while the tape archive was installing (with errors) I was researching for this very blog article and found that LBA starts at 504 MB… Recreating the hard disk images just few MB smaller took all tape and prior boot problems away! So to be on a safe side I have made the hard disk images 512 MB. In my infinite wisdom, for some unknown reason I’ve assumed that LBA addressing is required above 540MB. Then cpio -ict < /dev/dsk/1s1 was able to list contents of the emulated tape… with errors… In couple of iterations I was able to aim the host os dd if=file1 of=/dev/loop0 bs=512 seek=offset at the right place, which you work out using prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/1s0 command. Once VTOC was put in place I’ve attached the transfer disk image as a loopback device in my host OS. Fortunately dellsetup command does it all for you. A hard disk in Dell UNIX is pretty much unusable without a valid SysV partition and VTOC. The next step was to inject the tape “file” in to a right place on the disk, so it can be read by cpio command. Booting from the two install floppies and attaching two disk images was a snap. Unfortunately neither Dell UNIX supports LBA mode nor Qemu/Bochs support the Adaptec 154x controller required by the OS.Īs all normal install options have been exhausted, the only option left was to use a second hard disk image as source of cpio archive files. The original Dell 486 workstation had a 1GB SCSI hard disk. I have decided to try a hard disk image from a readily pre-installed system. Hopes for a network install are even slimmer since the required network support floppy disk has been lost and chances of suitable Ethernet driver working in Bochs or Qemu are equal to that of finding the lost floppy disk. Unfortunately no virtualization software can emulate a tape drive. The system can be installed from either a tape or network server (presumably NFS).
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