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Installing AT&T UNIX System V/386

I

iulianv

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 5, 2012
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75
Location
Romania
Today I put together an Intel 386DX-33-based system, and thought about trying something else than DOS/Win3x. So I started it from the first disk of an AT&T System V/386 floppy image set that I found somewhere online, just to see what happens. What happened is in the attached photo (sorry for the poor image quality, I used my cellphone to take it), and I'm wondering if there's something I can do about the HD controller panic issue...

Controller is this one - http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-di...R-INC-Two-IDE-AT-Interface-drives-MIO-23.html - and the hard-disk is some 1GB Seagate "prepared" with Seagate's flavour of Ontrack Disk Manager.

HDpanic.jpg
 
No, it doesn't (Gigabyte GA-386UM REV.2). I don't think I've ever seen a 386 mobo with on-board IDE...
 
1GB for a hard disk (it shouldn't matter if it's integrated or not) is pretty large for that time. You may want to start with something in the 100MB range.
 
The floppy disk was placed in the drive before Ontrack's "press space bar" prompt, but first boot device in BIOS was always C:... damn, I should have tried A: first, to bypass Ontrack... oh well, there's always another day.

Getting a small (a couple hundred megs) HDD is on my list for quite a while, but no luck yet... I haven't tried DOS 3.3 yet, but 6.22 installs without any hitch.

MikeS said:
Then you've lived a very sheltered life ;-)
Click to expand...

Maybe... but I'm not afraid of the Great Unknown, so enlighten me please... :D
 
Try to boot the first disk at the space bar prompt, press the space bar and see what happens.
When using a 4 gig drive with overlay software in my 386 using OS/2 v2 installation disks it recognises the drive as 4 gigs using this method. If used before that there's just sys errors
 
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This is the approach that leads to what's described in the first post - mainboard's BIOS is set to boot from C: first, Ontrack takes over and offers the "space bar" prompt, I hit space to boot from floppy, then things become a bit weird: it reads something from the floppy disk then some sort of quick reset happens (I get the Trident VGA BIOS screen, but not the mainboard's BIOS screen), then it continues reading the floppy, displays "Booting UNIX system" (or something like that) for one or two minutes while doing some more floppy-reading, then the screen in the first post.

What I will try later today is have the mainboard's BIOS boot from A: first, so that Ontrack isn't loaded anymore...
 
I think your On-Track software is probally messing you up. Try letting the computer bios directly reconize the drive and set up the cyls,hds,etc. You'll probally find that it'll only reconize the first 1023 cylinders and set the drive up as 512 mb in lieu of 1 gb. Then try installing the Unix. You could also probally set the drive up manually in bios as a small drive. When Unix takes over after the boot disk, it wants to directly access the hard drive through the bios. Any re-mapping of cyl/hds to a larger drive space will create problems.

Where did you get your disk images? I'd like to try them in a virtual machine.

Bill
 
Is there any way to "unprepare" the disk -- remove ontrack? Your drive capacity will be lower, but that's what you want. Ontrack was meant for DOS; I've never seen it used successfully with other OSes. Maybe Linux works with it nowadays, but back in 1994 it certainly didn't.
 
natcha said:
Where did you get your disk images? I'd like to try them in a virtual machine.
Click to expand...

I also have it, I downloaded it from a web site devoted to abandonware. I can not remember where it was.

You can also find it in the eMule network: search for this:

ed2k://|file|ATT-Unix_SVR4_v2.1.rar|8189309|2C04BF823D80EB993AF02A38C0287CF5|h=IIAJ4LI3GOOAQC6NPDBV66K4VWLIYWKR|/

It contains this:

Code: 
  AT&T UNIX System V Release 4 Version 2.1

  Description:
  ============
  It's UNIX. If you need more info, you don't need this Operating System.

  Here are 3.5" 1.44 MB image files with DCF extension and must be copied to
  diskette with CCOPY.EXE

  Sorry that the Copy Program is in German but the supplier was that mad.

  Installation:
  =============
  Get 30 3.5" formatted floppies.
  Run CCOPY.EXE (Hit a key to go past the intro screen)
  Press F2 to copy files to disk.
    QUELLE is source
      Choose any filename
    ZIEL is target
  Choose 3.5" FD
  GO and have fun!

                          LABEL             Version         X of X
  AT&T UNIX SVR4.0 2.1 --------------------------------------------------

  U01.DCF                 Maintanace Disk1  2.1             2 of 2
  U02.DCF                 Remote Terminal   2.1             1 of 1
                          Package
  U03.DCF                 BSD Comp. Pkg.    2.1             1 of 2
  U04.DCF                 BSD Comp. Pkg.    2.1             2 of 2
  U05.DCF                 Networking Supp.  2.1             1 of 1
                          Util. Pkg.
  U06.DCF                 Xenix Comp. Pkg   2.1             1 of 1
  U07.DCF                 FACE Pkg.         2.1             1 of 1
  U08.DCF                 FMLI Pkg.         2.1             1 of 1
  U09.DCF                 Editing Utils.    2.1             1 of 1
  U10.DCF                 OA&M Basic & Ext. 2.1             1 of 3
  U11.DCF                 OA&M Basic & Ext. 2.1             2 of 3
  U12.DCF                 OA&M Basic & Ext. 2.1             3 of 3
  U13.DCF                 Foundation Set    2.1             1 of 10
                          Base System Pkg.
                          2 User System
  U14.DCF                 Base              2.1a            1 of 10
  U15.DCF                 Base              2.1             2 of 10
  U16.DCF                 Base              2.1a            2 of 10
  U17.DCF                 Base              2.1             3 of 10
  U18.DCF                 Base              2.1             4 of 10
  U19.DCF                 Base              2.1             5 of 10
  U20.DCF                 Base              2.1             6 of 10
  U21.DCF                 Base              2.1             7 of 10
  U22.DCF                 Base              2.1             8 of 10
  U23.DCF                 Base              2.1             10 of 10
  U24.DCF                 Maintanance 1     2.1             1 of 2
  U25.DCF                 Base              2.1             9 of 10
  U26.DCF                 Printer Pkg       2.1             3 of 3
  U27.DCF                 Printer Pkg       2.1             2 of 3
  U28.DCF                 Printer Pkg       2.1             1 of 3
  U29.DCF                 16 to unlimited   2.1             1 of 1
                          User License
  U30.DCF                 2 to 16 User      2.1             1 of 1
                          License
 
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Wow, that's a lot of replies :)... BIOS doesn't seem to have any HDD auto-detect feature, but it allows me to enter the correct parameters of the drive (C/H/S=2099/16/63); moreover, DOS setup loaded straight from the FDD (no Ontrack) seems to "see" the full ~1GB capacity of the drive (does that mean that I have a pretty smart BIOS for a 386?).

The good news is that, if I boot straight from the FDD (no Ontrack), the AT&T UNIX setup eventually asks for the second floppy disk - I didn't prepare all of them so I'll not finish the setup process today, but I guess I'm on the right track :)...

The kit I'm using is either of these (I MD5ed the floppy images and they seem to be identical):

http://vetusware.com/download/AT_T UNIX System V Release 4 2.1.4
http://wdl2.winworldpc.com/Abandonw... UNIX System V Release 4 Version 2.1 (3.5).7z
 
Thanks for posting the images. I've tried booting it in a virtual machine, but get a panic:

Panic: usrxmemflt: 000000000

So I'm assuming, it dosen't like the xmem of the virtual machine.

I'm using Sun's VirtualBox, so I'll try a couple of the other virtual machines and see if it'll load on them.

Such fun :)

Bill
 
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