Creating a 2nd bootable hard drive (uPort)

[Scott Hammond]

The environment: Goldstar 386 box, dual Syquest Hard drives
with removable 44meg cartridges, floppy, plenty of ram

The OS: Essentially Microport SysVr3.0 with mods for dual language support

The problems:

  1.  How can I mount a bootable cartridge in the second drive?
  2.  Given that I have one bootable hard disk cartridge, how can I make
      a second one?

I'll start with my first source of confusion, the device files:

It is my understanding that typical device files for disks will include
raw and block names generally corresponding to 0s0, 0s1, 0s2, etc, which
refer to the entire disk, partition 0, partition 1, respectively, on the
first disk on controller 0. The second disk device files similarly named
1s0, 1s1, etc referring to the second disk on the controller 0, with
minor numbers starting at 16 or so, and of course the same major number
as the first disk. 

Our machines have all of these, but references to the 1s* devices still
refer to the first hard drive (as witnessed by reading from the device
and observing the disk lights). 

The second drive is referred to by a single block device called
/dev/sstb0 (maj=36,min=0), and this is the only device file which seems
to refer to the second drive.  I find this puzzling because both
drives appear to be on the same controller.

In dealing with problem 1 above, I need to be able to mount a bootable
cartridge from partition 1, where the root partition begins.  The sstb0
device refers to the entire disk as far as I can tell, and doesn't like
seeing the boot stuff in front when I try to mount it.  So I figure,
maybe they just left out device files for the other partitions, so I
create several (36,1), (36,2), etc, but when I reference them I get no
such device in response.  I did succeed in creating a raw device for
(36,0), but no others. 

On to problem 2, it would at least be helpful if I could build my own
bootable cartridges so I could upgrade old ones.  I figured that at
worst I should be able to use dd to copy from one to the other, but when
I try this I get "missing operating system" when I try to boot. 

I tried mkpart(1m), but either it doesn't see what it wants to in
/etc/partitions, or when it does it complains it is unable to configure
the driver or something to that effect.  I also tried ib(1m) to put the
boot information on the disk (which it seemed to do), but the results
were no better.

Finally, my kernel is not configurable (at least, don't have all
of the pieces) so I can't get any hints as to what gives with the
drivers or configuration.

Bonus question: on a couple of disks I have, fsck reports "unable to
read block 2" (or some other block) and loops trying to read this
block.  It seems I need to get that area on the disk marked bad, 
but I can't get mkpart to run and I don't know what else to try.

This is my first encounter with Microport; perhaps I am overlooking
something obvious.  Can anyone give me ideas as to what to try for any
of these problems?  Any help will be gratefully appreciated.  Thanks. 

-Scott
--
Scott Hammond,  R & D Associates, Marina del Rey, CA  (213) 822-1715
: {ksuvax1,zardoz,randvax}!rdahp!scott
:  scott at harris.cis.ksu.edu