Xenix-286 with Seagate SCSI drives

[Karl Denninger]

In article <601 at nixpbe.UUCP> freiss at nixpbe.UUCP (MArtin Freiss) writes:
>Hi,
>I'm fairly new to the Xenix brand of UN*X and would like the net's
>opinion on something. I apologize if this has been discussed before.
>
>I'm in the process of buying a harddisk for my '286 clone to run Xenix
>on. As the Seagate SCSI drive + controller bundled package comes cheaper
>over here than a "normal" MFM drive, I'm toying with the idea of buying
>one - about 60 meg, of which I want to reserve about 40 for Xenix.

No no no!

>I'm not worried about DOS, but how do I get Xenix to run with a SCSI
>drive? Is anyone out there who can give me pointers on how to install
>Xenix 286 (version 2.2.1) on this beast (or best, can give me a step
>by step explanation how to do it) ?

You can't normally.  The "cheap" SCSI controllers are supported only through
a BIOS rom, which of course isn't used in protected mode.

The end result is that you would have to write a disk driver.  This might
get >real< tricky, as you also need to do the boot-type things in order to
make it fly.  There >was< such a beast posted to one of the groups a while
back, but it would certainly need modification for Xenix, and I bet that
bringing up the system in the first place would be quite a bit of "fun".

In short, don't bother unless you like hacking on drivers and the like.

--
Karl Denninger (karl at ddsw1.MCS.COM, <well-connected>!ddsw1!karl)
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