Long shot question about Minix

[GRC7800]

I posted this on Atari-Forum, as well. But I was hoping to cast the net a bit wider for some help. Hopefully I get lucky and find an old Minix user.   

 

It's a question regarding Minix 1.5 for the ST.  

I installed this:

http://www.subsole.org/minix_on_the_atari_st

on my 4mb STe hard drive (It's actually a SD2ST.)

Boots up great, works great. I want to use this exclusively for the K&R C compiler. My problem is that none of my files are saved after I shut down the machine.

There is a sync command that you are supposed to do before you logoff, which I do. But next time I try and boot up Minix, the files are gone.

In Minix 1.5, there is a tos command. This brings up how to list the directories, and read and write to the disk drive and hard drive. It seems that I am successful in writing to a disk in Drive A, and I also seem to have been successful writing to Drive D on my hard drive.(I get no error messages.) However, when I go back to the GEM desktop, those files are not there.

Is anybody familiar with Minix enough to help?

Thanks in advance!

Edited March 24, 2023 by GRC7800
italicize Minix command names.

[buz]

Sorry just seeing this message.  I believe I can shed some light upon your issue.  If you haven't forgotten about this, and moved on.  Or maybe already heard the solution.  Minix on the Atari ST in it's standard configuration would create a memory disk which when the system booted, would copy files to the memory disk.  This made things faster as well as allowed for a single floppy disk system to work.  When I ran Minix on the Atari, I used a hard disk in the way back of time, and I would disable this capability.  There was a header file where you could configure things, and one of those things was using a memory disk.  I always disabled it.  I wanted max memory to run.  You had to then rebuild the kernel, and copy the rebuilt kernel to the boot floppy so it knew not to use a memory disk.  There were other things you could do in that header file.  Like tell it what partition of your hard disk has root on it, and what partion has /usr.  I believe by default the root partition was copied to the memory disk if you didn't disable the memory disk capability.  Minix partitions are not equivalent with TOS partitions, so you would not be able to see files on your Drive A.  I don't know what that distribution is you point to, I always used the standard Prentice Hall distribution of Minix for my work, so I don't know if the distribution you are pointing to is doing something different.

 

Buz

 

[project7800]

On 12/31/2023 at 7:54 PM, buz said:

Sorry just seeing this message.  I believe I can shed some light upon your issue.  If you haven't forgotten about this, and moved on.  Or maybe already heard the solution.  Minix on the Atari ST in it's standard configuration would create a memory disk which when the system booted, would copy files to the memory disk.  This made things faster as well as allowed for a single floppy disk system to work.  When I ran Minix on the Atari, I used a hard disk in the way back of time, and I would disable this capability.  There was a header file where you could configure things, and one of those things was using a memory disk.  I always disabled it.  I wanted max memory to run.  You had to then rebuild the kernel, and copy the rebuilt kernel to the boot floppy so it knew not to use a memory disk.  There were other things you could do in that header file.  Like tell it what partition of your hard disk has root on it, and what partion has /usr.  I believe by default the root partition was copied to the memory disk if you didn't disable the memory disk capability.  Minix partitions are not equivalent with TOS partitions, so you would not be able to see files on your Drive A.  I don't know what that distribution is you point to, I always used the standard Prentice Hall distribution of Minix for my work, so I don't know if the distribution you are pointing to is doing something different.

 

Buz

 

Thanks for your reply. I really appreciate it!  I got some help on Atari-Forum and I've been using Minix ever since! It's great!