Installation of OpenStep 4.2 on a Dell Inspiron 5150 (2003).
CPU: Pentium 4@ 3.06Ghz
GFX: ATI Radeon 9000 w/ 32MB RAM
RAM 512MB,
CD: PHILIPS DVD+RW SDVD6004 (Internal)
HDD: 60GB 2.5" IDE
IDE connector: ICH4
Floppy: None
Windows XP Home is installed on the first partition and it has my student copy of Office 2003 and I'm having trouble trying to shift the files to a later partition so i can 'dd' a IDE image to the start of the HDD.
Problem 1: No keyboard input after memory scan at the beginning.
Solved: By holding down left shift at the start you can bypass the memory scan. It reads the memory from the BIOS max 64MB, this is ok as memory can be configured on the command line.
Problem 2: CD and HDD is not being detected after selecting EIDE drivers at boot, Maybe because they are over 8GB and this is the CD version of OpenStep and not the patched binaries which support 8GB+.
It registers a hd0 is getting detected as
hd0: 1024 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 spt
hd0: using single sector transfers.
Registering: hd0
hd0: Device Block Size: 512 bytes
hd0: Device Capacity: 8032 MB
as for hc0:
hc0: device detected at port 0x1f0 irq 14
hc0: Checking for ATA drive 0...
hc0: drive 0, type 55, using geometry from INT table.
hc0: WARNING: using BIOS geometry for drive 0.
hc0: Checking for ATA drive 1...
hc0: Checking for ATAPI drive 1...
hc0: Resetting drives...
Registering: hc0
hc0: ATA command 20 failed. Retrying...
hc0: ATA Command: error=0x1 secCnt=0x1 secNum=0x1 cyl=0xeb14 drhd=0xe0 status=0x0
hc1: device detected at port 0x170 irq 15
hc1: Checking for ATA drive 0... Detected
hc1: Checking for ATA drive 1...
hc1: Checking for ATAPI drive 1...
hc1: Resetting drives...
Registering: hc1
hd1: IC25N060ATMR04-0 MO3OAD0A
hd1: 16383 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 spt (disk geometry)
hd1: using multisector (16) transfers.
Registering: hd1
hd1: Device Block Size: 512 bytes
hd1: Device Capacity: 8063 MB
IRQ Levels: Couldn't reserve 14
configureDriver: could not allocate resources for class DualEide
Registering: event0
Registering: kmDevice0
No SCSI controller or CD-ROM drive found
with this final error before system panic
hc0: Resetting drives...
rootdev 30f, howto 3
vfs_mountroot: error=6
panic: (Cpu 0) vfs_mountroot: cannot mount root
panic: NeXT Mach 4.2: Wed Apr 16 13:44:57 PDT 1997; root(rcbuilder):Objects/mk-183.34.obj~2/RELEASE_I386
System Panic:
vfs_mountroot: cannot mount root
so it detects hd1 as my HDD, it just has problem detecting a CD-ROM to read the CD, so that should mean by using 'dd' to write a OpenStep Image it should boot ok on my laptop.
@Rob Blessin Black Hole I don't have any floppy disk drives and I can't disable USB ports in the BIOS. I'm booting into OpenSTEP by doing the CD switch (drivers on one CD, and switch to User CD right at the end).
My guess is that you are actually not loading a boot driver for dual channel eide drivers ....then again I have simply used a floppy drive for this part of the very beginning on NeXT installs on Intel . This is a laptop and not a workstation correct?
You may be able to use a Dell PC to install Openstep on a hard drive first ,
it is a can of worms for sure as I have not tried it on this model of Dell laptop.....
* F2 usually drops you into bios where you should find a toggle on and off for USB enabled or disabled.
* I haven't tried "I'm booting into OpenSTEP by doing the CD switch (drivers on one CD, and switch to User CD right at the end)." it sounds cool and I did not know this works ???
* 60Gb hard drive , I have insalled Openstep on larger hard drives my experience install even with Y2k patches goes well she will even run but first hard shut down then a check disk on reboot and everything goes haywire as it doesn't understand the out of parameter disk drive geometries of the larger hard drive .... my guess is this is an artifact of earlier rev of check disk ...... looks from the panic is it is not finding the cdrom drive openstep image .... I think their was a pcmcia 1460 scsi card which had a nextstep driver ..... see them on eBay also I found this gem for you
https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Installing_NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP_On_A_Laptop
Quote from: Rob Blessin Black Hole on October 09, 2023, 04:01:37 PMMy guess is that you are actually not loading a boot driver for dual channel eide drivers ....then again I have simply used a floppy drive for this part of the very beginning on NeXT installs on Intel . This is a laptop and not a workstation correct?
You may be able to use a Dell PC to install Openstep on a hard drive first ,
it is a can of worms for sure as I have not tried it on this model of Dell laptop.....
* F2 usually drops you into bios where you should find a toggle on and off for USB enabled or disabled.
* I haven't tried "I'm booting into OpenSTEP by doing the CD switch (drivers on one CD, and switch to User CD right at the end)." it sounds cool and I did not know this works ???
* 60Gb hard drive , I have insalled Openstep on larger hard drives my experience install even with Y2k patches goes well she will even run but first hard shut down then a check disk on reboot and everything goes haywire as it doesn't understand the out of parameter disk drive geometries of the larger hard drive .... my guess is this is an artifact of earlier rev of check disk ...... looks from the panic is it is not finding the cdrom drive openstep image .... I think their was a pcmcia 1460 scsi card which had a nextstep driver ..... see them on eBay also I found this gem for you https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Installing_NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP_On_A_Laptop
Yeah I can't disable any of the USB features in the BIOS menu, it is also has the last released BIOS for that model.
I've had a look at the Laptop guide, it's a bit dated as they were using hardware before mine.
Everyone on this site says that even when they have a patched 4.2 OpenStep, they still play it save and use 4GB partitions which is understandable.
Also from NeXT Answers 1650: Large IDE Drive Problems with NEXTSTEP 3.2 (
https://web.archive.org/web/19970412215742/http://www.next.com/NeXTanswers/HTMLFiles/1650.htmld/1650.html)
QuoteThe geometry limitation of 1024 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors per track stems from a combination of both the ATA specification and your BIOS's limits. The IDE limitations are set in the original ATA specification (see http://www.symbios.com/ftp/pub/standards/io/ata/ata-r4c.txt) . BIOS limits come from the INT 13 read/write calls that combine a 10 bit cylinder value with a 6 bit sector value into a 16 bit register. The following table demonstrates how each contributes to the limitation.
BIOS IDE Limitation
Maximum Cylinders 1024 65536 1024
Maximum Heads 255 16 16
Maximum Sectors/Track 63 255 63
Maximum Capacity 7.84GB 127.5GB 504MB
Caution
In addition to the standard IDE driver, NEXTSTEP 3.3 includes a revised IDE driver that resolves the geometry problem. This updated driver asks the disk for its geometry instead of obtaining it from the BIOS. If you are currently using the NEXTSTEP 3.2 IDE driver and will be upgrading to NEXTSTEP 3.3 (or later), you may use the revised IDE driver but you will have to both reset the BIOS settings and reinitialize the drive (reinstall all operating systems). However, you may continue to use the standard IDE driver with no difference in operation.
The CD switch technique was mentioned in this forum 10 years ago, they create a 2.88MB floppy with the kernal and drivers they need for the system then burn it to CD and swap to the USER CD at before you press the final "1. Continue to Load".
Does any one have the errors for
vfs_mountroot? I've looked at /kernel/bsd/vfs/vfs_subr.c (
https://github.com/RhapsodiOS/Kernel/blob/22ad0c8485691fcee31e57117a62a3e338868811/kernel/bsd/vfs/vfs_subr.c#L286) but the error message I received in the first post is rather cryptic:
hc0: Resetting drives...
rootdev 30f, howto 3
vfs_mountroot: error=6
panic: (Cpu 0) vfs_mountroot: cannot mount root
panic: NeXT Mach 4.2: Wed Apr 16 13:44:57 PDT 1997; root(rcbuilder):Objects/mk-183.34.obj~2/RELEASE_I386
System Panic:
vfs_mountroot: cannot mount root
I understand it can't mount root which means it can't find and mount the filesystem on the install (Openstep 4.2 User CD) rootdev=cdrom, but those other errors rootdev 30f, howto 3
vfs_mountroot: error=6.
Thanks
I haven't had good experiences installing nextstep on ide drives. I get a much stabler experience using scsi drives (If they are 36Gb or smaller). Also because nextstep only allows 7 slices per disk. You can only use 7 4gb partitions, which comes out to 28Gb. Slice H is used to refer to the raw device.
Quote from: Apple2guy on October 10, 2023, 11:03:52 AMI haven't had good experiences installing nextstep on ide drives. I get a much stabler experience using scsi drives (If they are 36Gb or smaller). Also because nextstep only allows 7 slices per disk. You can only use 7 4gb partitions, which comes out to 28Gb. Slice H is used to refer to the raw device.
I find it interesting that you haven't had good experiences installing Nextstep on IDE drives.
Slice H is referred to IDE drives and S for SCSI drives with partition h (i.e /dev/rsd0h) being the full drive.
Is there a reason why you have a personal preference for NextStep over OpenStep?
I use Openstep 4.2, I was referencing openstep/nextstep . Were you confusing device names Sd(x) for scsi and hd(x) for ide? A slice can be considered an nextstep/openstep analog to a fdisk type partition. I don't like using IDE because the Driver sucks. It detects my IDE devices like PIIX but actually getting dma to work on it... Good luck. If you have verbose boot on you can see it tries DMA then always reverts back to Pio modes. The only time I got DMA to work was on virtual hardware.
Quote from: Apple2guy on October 12, 2023, 08:54:11 AMI use Openstep 4.2, I was referencing openstep/nextstep . Were you confusing device names Sd(x) for scsi and hd(x) for ide? A slice can be considered an nextstep/openstep analog to a fdisk type partition.
QuoteNo I was selecting the "Dual IDE driver" I even tried selecting the Adaptec SCSI driver first like it mentioned for Installing Nextstep 3.3 but didn't have much luck with that either.
Quote from: Apple2guy on October 12, 2023, 08:54:11 AMI don't like using IDE because the Driver sucks. It detects my IDE devices like PIIX but actually getting dma to work on it... Good luck. If you have verbose boot on you can see it tries DMA then always reverts back to Pio modes. The only time I got DMA to work was on virtual hardware.
LOL ;D Faulty hardware or faulty emulation?!?
So I downloaded a 3GB OpenStep 4.2 Patched HD image in one of the threads (Must have been under 3 years old) and used NetBSD to dd it directly to my HD hoping that OpenStep would boot on reboot, but it's still having trouble talking to the IDE driver with log similar to the top post.
I was hoping the problem was that OpenStep wasn't recognizing the User CD while installing so that if I wrote a HD image direct to the HD it would boot if that. This does not seem to be the case.
hc(1,a)mach_kernel
hd(0,a)mach_kernel
are the only two commands that get anywhere at the boot menu.
hc(1,a)mach_kernel can't load "/private/Drivers/i386/System.Config"
hd(0,a)mach_kernel loads and boots but doesn't get past the hc0, hd0 HD detection part as mentioned above.
So after using hexi to hexedit the PCI Identification strings in the
EIDE v3.37 driver for the
Intel 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE which are
0x71118086 which are reversed because of the endian
0x86801171, I replaced them with the ICH4M which is backwards compatible with PIIX4 IDE as per specification in documentations as provided on the intel site.
So replaced with
Intel 82801 DBM (ICH4-M) IDE Controller PCI string
0x24ca8086. Copied that NS3.33 2.88MB custom boot disk with drivers on as per user
@itomato instructions on making a bootable OS4.2 CD.
So yeah the nasty band-aid worked, I was able to boot the NS3.3 install image (I was using a USB stick with Grub that can boot 1.44MB/2.88MB floppy images) and the driver detected and ran on the ICH4-M hardware.
So with that NS3.3 image I was able mount the 4.2 image that I had
dd on to the DELL HDD. It took a while to mount because as the driver was detecting drives, the USB HDD slowed it right down, while detecting.
I couldn't do much with that 4.2 image, I was hoping that I would have a 512MB NS3.3 image that I could
dd to the HDD tonight but it's taking a lot longer to make and install it then expected.
Fingers crossed I will have a half working NS3.3 image up and running this weekend (VGA only driver), may have to create a DOS partition to on the HDD to copy file over.
Good luck :)
Quote from: nuss on June 25, 2024, 07:45:45 AMGood luck :)
Thanks, Yeah I'm hoping that when it gets up and running this weekend that other users on this forum with ICHX-(X) IDE hardware will give it a go with modifying the EIDE 3.37 driver, of course
ALL data on that HDD will need to be backed up first and no warranties are given and I claim no responsibility....Would just hopefully mean that we can get more NS 3.3, OS 4.2 and even R-DR2 boxes up and running.
Created a 512MB NS3.3 image in Virtual Box and installing, NS User, Developer, EOF and patches.
Patched ICH4M PCI strings in the EIDE 3.37 driver available on this website.
Used a linux install usb stick to dd the image directly to the first 512MB on the HDD.
Like first post takes about 5-10 minutes to get to login screen as it spends ages trying to probe hc0 and finds nothing.
Probes hd0 and finds nothing.
Probes hd1 and finds something.
In fact the only way I can get it to boot is to use rootdev=hd1a at boot screen, all options produce the kernal crash screen.
Now at the moment with rootdev=hd1a I'm at the login screen with the wheel of death, I can't enter user name or password. I was hoping after 5 minutes I would get keyboard input because maybe it was just checking and fixing the HDD. Unless it's networking running in the background (I haven't set up anything)
I guess I'll be booting into singer user mode at the boot screen.
Quote from: pTeK on October 09, 2023, 03:43:25 AMProblem 2: CD and HDD is not being detected after selecting EIDE drivers at boot, Maybe because they are over 8GB and this is the CD version of OpenStep and not the patched binaries which support 8GB+.
It registers a hd0 is getting detected as
hd0: 1024 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 spt
hd0: using single sector transfers.
Registering: hd0
hd0: Device Block Size: 512 bytes
hd0: Device Capacity: 8032 MB
as for hc0:
hc0: device detected at port 0x1f0 irq 14
hc0: Checking for ATA drive 0...
hc0: drive 0, type 55, using geometry from INT table.
hc0: WARNING: using BIOS geometry for drive 0.
hc0: Checking for ATA drive 1...
hc0: Checking for ATAPI drive 1...
hc0: Resetting drives...
Registering: hc0
hc0: ATA command 20 failed. Retrying...
hc0: ATA Command: error=0x1 secCnt=0x1 secNum=0x1 cyl=0xeb14 drhd=0xe0 status=0x0
So finally figured out that hc0 was
hard drive controller 0 and hc1 was
hard driver controller 1. Is it possible to edit the Instance0.table file so it doesn't probe
hc0 at all and just probes
hc1? Having to wait about 10 minutes before I can boot in to single-user mode is not fun. Currently going though the darwin EIDE driver source to find out what bytes I need to patch to bring the waiting time down to a few seconds than minutes, as I remember user
@neozeed also posted about this when he was compiling the Rhapsody kernel.
Slowly making progress. Now that I can log in after 5 minutes and use VGA resolution. Just ran Lubuntu 16.04 LTS on a USB stick (No NetBSD live image) so I could read the log from X11 (the memory addresses) so I can start attempting to make a ATI Radeon 9000 driver. 640x480x2bp is not much fun, If I could get the max resolution 1400x1050 would be great, but more colours and a greater resolution would be great.
Getting closer to getting it working on the machine.
Installed OS4.2 With patches on a Virtualbox machine and created a flat hard disk image of 512MB with no other partitions on that image.
Used
dd on a Linux image to write it to the front of the IDE HD image on the machine.
Had to patch the boot loader so it doesn't freeze during the memory scanning at the beginning as I posted here. (
https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?msg=30540)
The VESA driver works and I've got it set to 1400x1050x8bpp (Yes I know 256 colours). I still have to try 16 and 32 bit at that resolution but the 1400x1050 is very beautiful :)
I've also had to patch the EIDE beta driver which is not available on the OpenStep 4.2 USR CD when installing. It's available on this site and also at NeXT Answers 2266: EIDE.pkg (
https://web.archive.org/web/19970412203319/http://www.next.com/NeXTanswers/HTMLFiles/2266.htmld/2266.html)
I had to patch the PIIX4 to the ICH4M strings which is on my laptop. ICH4M is backwards compatible with PIIX4.
I've always had to boot in single user mode and define the root partition and maximum memory with:
maxmem=262144 rootdev=hd1a -sGoing to try modifying
/usr/Devices/System.config/Instance0.table and add the above string to the
"Kernel Flags" line.
Changed my EIDE driver from PIIX4 to EIDE and ATAPI Device Controller(V4.03).
Port Address to 0x170 and IRQ 15, Master = ATA.
Had to do that because it took 10 minutes to boot as it was probably finding the DVD burner on the hc0 but could not identify it.
With these changes the system now boots in less than one minute, now I have to create a disktab and get the ethernet card or DVD burner up and running to read CDs.
fdisk is having problems with error:
NeXT fdisk v1.02a
Segmentation fault
Probably because I wrote the 512mb Virtual Box HDD to the 60GB HDD and there are no partitions written to the MBR so have to do some manual calculations and hopefully create a rhd0b and copy all the files to it and re size the rhd0a partition again with a disktab.
fun times.