Very Computer

 > I don't think that the question was really answered.  If I had asked
"can you
 > boot Linux from your hard disk" and was told "install Linux on your
hard disk
 > and boot from this floppy", I would be a little annoyed because I
don't think
 > that this is _booting_ from the hard drive.

You're right, the question wasn't answered.

 > I'm interested in knowing whether anyone has successfully set up
booting from
 > a JaZ drive.  A friend of mine worked on this on systems that he had
access to
 > and didn't have much success (I believe the systems that he tested
were Adaptec
 > 2940UW and BusLogic 946(?) with IDE hard drives and a SCSI Jaz
drive).

Ditch the Adaptec and stick with the Buslogic. They're supported better.

 > What I would like to know is whether anyone has a system that can
boot from a
 > SCSI Jaz drive using LILO when there are IDE hard drives present.

This is fairly simple. The Jaz looks like a hard drive to the system,
and has all the properties of a hard drive. Most SCSI BIOS setups have
an option that sounds something like, "make removable drives act like
hard drives." With that set, you can install Linux on the Jaz as if it
were a non-removable hard drive and boot from it directly, with LILO
installed in the Jaz disk's MBR.

It will also boot if you install LILO in the MBR of the IDE hard drive.

 > I would like to try Linux, but for now from Jaz removable disk ONLY.
 > I'm not yet willing to reorganize my hard disk partitions and/or to
 > add another HDD for the Linux operating system.

The Jaz is perfectly acceptable as a main Linux drive. It offers
near-hard disk performance, and lots of capacity.

Installation, booting, and operation are identical to those of a "real"
hard drive. Technically, you wouldn't be booting from the Jaz, you'd be
booting from your EIDE hard drive, while loading and operating Linux on
the Jaz.

 > As I understand, System Commander might/should help (?), but may I go
 > without, too?

Not necessary. You can install LILO on your main EIDE hard drive and
confiugure it to start Windows 95 normally, and Linux from the Jaz. The
main reason you would want to do that is because most systems will not
boot directly from SCSI drives if IDE drives are present.

Another option is to install LILO on a floppy disk.

Wannabe a Linux user. Also, buying an Iomega Jaz Drive Insider...

Thinking why not - if possible - to use my Jaz Drive as an alternative
boot device, e.g. for Linux operating system?

Sorry if the question is technically incorrect, stupid, or
trivial.

My computer gives mi the choice to boot either from floppy, CD-ROM,
hard disk or network. However, SCSI devices are not mentioned in its
CMOS setup.

On Iomega Web site I just found the following notice:

http://www.iomega.com/support/techs/jaz/4001.html

Quote:> The Jaz drive can be used as the computer's boot disk if configured
> properly. Normally the drive must be set to SCSI ID 0 and the SCSI
> adapter must have a bootable BIOS. For example, the Jaz Jet PCI SCSI
> adapter is a bootable adapter.

I would like to try Linux, but for now from Jaz removable disk ONLY.
I'm not yet willing to reorganize my hard disk partitions and/or to
add another HDD for the Linux operating system.

As I understand, System Commander might/should help (?), but may I go
without, too?

[Computer: HP Pavilion, OS: Windows 95 (and how if upgraded to NT?).]

Thank you for your expertise,
Ivo

Quote:> On Iomega Web site I just found the following notice:

> http://www.iomega.com/support/techs/jaz/4001.html
> > The Jaz drive can be used as the computer's boot disk if configured
> > properly. Normally the drive must be set to SCSI ID 0 and the SCSI
> > adapter must have a bootable BIOS. For example, the Jaz Jet PCI SCSI
> > adapter is a bootable adapter.

> I do have a Jaz Jet PCI SCSI adapter, and now I'm buying the Jaz
> Insider drive.

> I would like to try Linux, but for now from Jaz removable disk ONLY.
> I'm not yet willing to reorganize my hard disk partitions and/or to
> add another HDD for the Linux operating system.

> As I understand, System Commander might/should help (?), but may I go
> without, too?

--
Frank Sweetser rasmusin at wpi.edu fsweetser at blee.net | PGP key available
paramount.res.wpi.net RedHat Linux 2.0.31pre9 i486       | at public servers
Woody: Hey, Mr. Peterson, Jack Frost nipping at your nose?
Norm:  Yep, now let's get Joe Beer nipping at my liver, huh?
                -- Cheers, Feeble Attraction

Yes, booting linux from Jaz is do-able.

In fact, I'm doing it myself.

Here's the scoop:

1) get a root disk image that recognize your SCSI card (ie:
aha152x.s)
2) get a boot disk image you want (ie: color.gz)
3) make sure you can access your source media (be it CDROM or hard
disk partition
4) boot off your machine using the boot/root disk combo
5) login as root and fdisk your Jaz disk.  If it's a DOS formatted
disks, the partition will be /dev/sda4.  Blow off the partition and
create 2 primary, /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2.  Make one of them linux
native and the other one linux swap
6) go through the actual setup
7) copy the kernal to floppy /dev/fd0 (this should be done during
install)
8) reboot your machine using this new boot floppy

You should now be up and running on Slackware.  At least that's how I
get to run my new Slackware 3.3.

I just did the above steps on the past Sunday night...

My machine:
486/66
Promise 2300 E/IDE with 1 Gig Fujitsu on the primary channel (master)
Adaptec 1522 SCSI controller with Plextor 4Plex and Jaz internal
32Meg RAM
ProAudioSpectrum 16
Maui
Number9 FX 771 VLB
Conner 250Meg tape streamer

As you can see, very old and slow stuff, yet Linux feels a lot peppier
than win95...

: >
: > Wannabe a Linux user. Also, buying an Iomega Jaz Drive Insider...
: >
: > Thinking why not - if possible - to use my Jaz Drive as an alternative
: > boot device, e.g. for Linux operating system?
: >
: > Sorry if the question is technically incorrect, stupid, or
: > trivial.
: >
: >
: > My computer gives mi the choice to boot either from floppy, CD-ROM,
: > hard disk or network. However, SCSI devices are not mentioned in its
: > CMOS setup.

: Well, I don't know if you can actually use the jaz drive as the boot
: device, but you can boot off of a floppy and run linux off of the jaz drive
: once the kernel is booted.  It's been done before.

: > On Iomega Web site I just found the following notice:
: >
: > http://www.iomega.com/support/techs/jaz/4001.html
: > > The Jaz drive can be used as the computer's boot disk if configured
: > > properly. Normally the drive must be set to SCSI ID 0 and the SCSI
: > > adapter must have a bootable BIOS. For example, the Jaz Jet PCI SCSI
: > > adapter is a bootable adapter.
: >
: > I do have a Jaz Jet PCI SCSI adapter, and now I'm buying the Jaz
: > Insider drive.
: >
: >
: > I would like to try Linux, but for now from Jaz removable disk ONLY.
: > I'm not yet willing to reorganize my hard disk partitions and/or to
: > add another HDD for the Linux operating system.
: >
: > As I understand, System Commander might/should help (?), but may I go
: > without, too?

: System Commander might work... I don't really know.  I know theat the
: floppy method will work, though (and it's a lot cheaper :)

: --
: Frank Sweetser rasmusin at wpi.edu fsweetser at blee.net | PGP key available
: paramount.res.wpi.net RedHat Linux 2.0.31pre9 i486       | at public servers
: Woody: Hey, Mr. Peterson, Jack Frost nipping at your nose?
: Norm:  Yep, now let's get Joe Beer nipping at my liver, huh?
:               -- Cheers, Feeble Attraction

(Mailed and Posted)

I don't think that the question was really answered.  If I had asked "can you
boot Linux from your hard disk" and was told "install Linux on your hard disk
and boot from this floppy", I would be a little annoyed because I don't think
that this is _booting_ from the hard drive.

I'm interested in knowing whether anyone has successfully set up booting from
a JaZ drive.  A friend of mine worked on this on systems that he had access to
and didn't have much success (I believe the systems that he tested were Adaptec
2940UW and BusLogic 946(?) with IDE hard drives and a SCSI Jaz drive).

What I would like to know is whether anyone has a system that can boot from a
SCSI Jaz drive using LILO when there are IDE hard drives present.

Paul

(Mailed and Posted)

I don't think that the question was really answered.  If I had asked "can you
boot Linux from your hard disk" and was told "install Linux on your hard disk
and boot from this floppy", I would be a little annoyed because I don't think
that this is _booting_ from the hard drive.

I'm interested in knowing whether anyone has successfully set up booting from
a JaZ drive.  A friend of mine worked on this on systems that he had access to
and didn't have much success (I believe the systems that he tested were Adaptec
2940UW and BusLogic 946(?) with IDE hard drives and a SCSI Jaz drive).

What I would like to know is whether anyone has a system that can boot from a
SCSI Jaz drive using LILO when there are IDE hard drives present.

Paul

Can anyone show us how to boot the Jaz <without> a floppy?

Quote:>What I would like to know is whether anyone has a system that can boot from a
>SCSI Jaz drive using LILO when there are IDE hard drives present.

Some BIOS's will allow you to give SCSI priority over IDE for drive
number assignment.

--Tim Smith

Quote:>Well, I don't know if you can actually use the jaz drive as the boot
>device, but you can boot off of a floppy and run linux off of the jaz drive
>once the kernel is booted.  It's been done before.

However, both times I've tried it with Linux, LILO has failed.  With
Red Hat 4.1, it prints "LI" over and over (I haven't tried that in a
while, so I may be misrembering where it is looping...it might print "LI"
and the loop printing "LO" over and over).

With Caldera OpenLinux (now available at Egghead, by the way), it just
prints "LI" and hangs.  FreeBSD, Windows 95, and Windows NT all boot
fine from my Jaz, so I don't think this is my fault.

--Tim Smith

Well, almost. I can do what you mentioned from my SCSI SyQuest drive.
It's tricky, though. The LILO.config file must contain a line declaring
where the drive is located *after* the LINUX kernel an been loaded.
At boot it will be fine (BIOS drive $80 as the hostadapter reports).
After loading, however, it will be some other partition, depending on
how many devices are found on the bus *before* the syquest.

So, my setup will boot from the syquest, even if all other drives
were blank. It will not boot without rerunning LILO with a different
configfile, if I take the other drives out of the system.

Have a look at the lilo.conf manpage/howto. I think the option is
root=some_hex_number.

regards

HJL

The question's not stupid or trivial, and there's a number of
solutions (see the thread).  I found a direct boot from Jaz wasn't
possible, but have a near hit using floppy and borrowing a fixed
harddrive partition.  Here's my 2 cents.

What you can do depends on your hardware, including some issues you
didn't mention:
- what's your SCSI adapter?  Is it bootable?
- what's your hard drive(s)  If non-SCSI (eg: IDE), can boot be
disabled?  (hint: probably not)
- what else do you have on your system.  How badly do you want to
avoid trashing it?

Most machines will boot from the following, in order
1. Floppy (if present, always)
2. IDE hard drive (if present, always?)
3. SCSI drive(s) (if bootable, as configured in SCSI setup)

My system is NT/Linux, with Linux on Jaz.  2GB Western Digital HD is
IDE, and pretty darn near all NTFS, with one 4MB FAT partition up
high.  This partition is labled 'L' under NT (for Linux, naturally),
but is seen as 'C' when booting from a DOS floppy.  Because the
partition is not in the first sector of the disk, I cannot boot DOS
directly from HD.

My solution, after mucking around with a number of options (trying to
boot Jaz (impossible, in my case), boot floppies (didn't work)), was
to use a plain 'ole DOS boot floppy with an AUTOEXEC.BAT on it.
AUTOEXEC launches LOADLIN.EXE on the FAT partition, which also has a
linux image and (if needed) an initrd (inital RAM disk, useful for
loading modules, such as SCSI drivers, if needed and not available in
your kernal).  

LOADLIN is a DOS executable which launches linux by "pulling the rug
out" from under DOS.  It was supplied with my installation (RedHat
4.1), and is available for download (don't ask me where <g>).

This works great, doesn't endanger my NT partitions, and is fast --
faster than a boot floppy, even faster than NT boot. DOS and
AUTOEXEC.BAT are all I read off of floppy.  LOADLIN and the linux
image read from harddrive in less than a second, most of the wait is
watching intrd go through runlevels (which could be streamlined...).

Only problem so far is that my original Linux jaz disk crapped out (1
of 6 bought so far) -- bad blocks up about 60% of the way through the
disk.  Because I'd created multiple filesystems (11!), I only lost one
filesystem (/data) with hardly anything on it.  This is the best
argument I can give for partitioning a single disk, which otherwise
might seem overkill.  

I didn't have a good way to back off everything else.  Did a pretty
good backup by tarring and compressing config files which I untarred
back after a fresh install of Linux on a new disk.  Strongly recommend
a *real* backup device (I'm leaning toward DAT), and/or a dedicated
machine or internal HD after you fall in love with Linux.  A larger
FAT partition would also make transfers between the NT and Linux world
a bit easier.

FSs, BTW, for a mostly single-user workstation, PPP dialup, possible
local network server:

Device          Mount           Size
/dev/sda1       swap            32MB
/dev/sda2       /               20MB
/dev/sda3       /usr            250MB
/dev/sda4       extended
/dev/sda5       /usr/lib        130MB  
/dev/sda6       /usr/local      100MB
/dev/sda7       /usr/src        50MB
/dev/sda8       /home           50MB
/dev/sda9       /var            50MB
/dev/sda10      /tmp            15MB
/dev/sda11      /data           348MB
/dev/hda6       /mnt/hd         4MB (msdos)

I've found I can kludge a data transfer by booting from the install
floppy, and copying data to and from the Linux Jaz disk to a ramdisk
(I've got 96 MB ram, easy to set up a 10 - 40 MB ramdisk), to/from a
transfer Jaz disk.  This is how I accomplish sw installs from internet
downloads right now -- kludgy, but it works.  Reboots are necessary.

On or about Tue, 16 Sep 1997 12:49:00 -0500, Ivo Penzar

Quote:

>Wannabe a Linux user. Also, buying an Iomega Jaz Drive Insider...

>Thinking why not - if possible - to use my Jaz Drive as an alternative
>boot device, e.g. for Linux operating system?

>Sorry if the question is technically incorrect, stupid, or
>trivial.

>My computer gives mi the choice to boot either from floppy, CD-ROM,
>hard disk or network. However, SCSI devices are not mentioned in its
>CMOS setup.

>On Iomega Web site I just found the following notice:

>http://www.iomega.com/support/techs/jaz/4001.html
>> The Jaz drive can be used as the computer's boot disk if configured
>> properly. Normally the drive must be set to SCSI ID 0 and the SCSI
>> adapter must have a bootable BIOS. For example, the Jaz Jet PCI SCSI
>> adapter is a bootable adapter.

>I do have a Jaz Jet PCI SCSI adapter, and now I'm buying the Jaz
>Insider drive.

>I would like to try Linux, but for now from Jaz removable disk ONLY.
>I'm not yet willing to reorganize my hard disk partitions and/or to
>add another HDD for the Linux operating system.

>As I understand, System Commander might/should help (?), but may I go
>without, too?

>[Computer: HP Pavilion, OS: Windows 95 (and how if upgraded to NT?).]

>Thank you for your expertise,
>Ivo

 ...humans, remove the spam guard from the above
 ...spambots, spam to hell

    What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?

On or about Mon, 22 Sep 1997 06:27:52 GMT,

conspired:

Quote:>Only problem so far is that my original Linux jaz disk crapped out (1
>of 6 bought so far) -- bad blocks up about 60% of the way through the
>disk.  Because I'd created multiple filesystems (11!), I only lost one
>filesystem (/data) with hardly anything on it.  This is the best
>argument I can give for partitioning a single disk, which otherwise
>might seem overkill.  

VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Adding Swap: 32748k swap-space
scsi0: MEDIUM ERROR on channel 0, id 4, lun 0, CDB: Read (6) 16 48 2c
10 00
Current error sd08:0b: sense key Medium Error
Additional sense indicates Address mark not found for data field
scsidisk I/O error: dev 08:0b, sector 16396
scsi : aborting command due to timeout : pid 7140, scsi0, channel 0,
id 4, lun 0 Read (6) 16 48 2e 0e 00
aic7xxx: (abort) Aborting scb 1, TCL 4/0/0
scsi0: Target 4 underflow - Wanted at least 7168, got 6656, residual
SG count 3.
scsi0: MEDIUM ERROR on channel 0, id 4, lun 0, CDB: Read (6) 16 48 2e
0e 00
Current error sd08:0b: sense key Medium Error
Additional sense indicates Recorded entity not found
scsidisk I/O error: dev 08:0b, sector 16398
scsi : aborting command due to timeout : pid 7141, scsi0, channel 0,
id 4, lun 0 Read (6) 16 48 30 0c 00

 ...humans, remove the spam guard from the above
 ...spambots, spam to hell

    What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?

More on the Saga.  There is a populist-minded Iomega newsgroup at
alt.iomega.zip.jazz (sic).  Not sure of the veracity, but I can vouch
for the ferocity.  There's a lot of unhappy campers out there.  There's
a class action sign-on, I believe for Zip, if anyone's interested....

Tracking down my disk failures, there are three hypotheses:
1. Rotten luck with the media (the "royal" treatment?)
2. Physically damaged drive (suggested by tech support -- a bad r/w
head, one of
the three platters, might cause this.
3. BIOS bug.  H72 is apparently the common/only BIOS, but there are
persistant mentionings of a BIOS version with a bug affecting Jaz, with
very little technical information explaining how or why this causes
problesm, or why the same BIOS performs differently in different cases.

A very common failure mode is for r/w errors and SCSI errors to be
reported, often causing a Kernel panic or locking the machine.
Formatting via windows Iomega Jaz tools either craps out at 63%, or
skips rapidly from about 60% through the rest of the disk (I experienced
the latter).  Multiple people report this, with no explanation from
Iomega.  The general conclusion is that this indicates you have at least
a bad disk, and very possibly a bad drive.  Symptoms are common across
multiple OSs (Linux, NT, Win95, Mac).

Several people mention that Jaz should be formatted only by Iomega Jaz
Tools because of "proprietary sections" on the platter.  I don't know
what this bodes for those of us who fdisked the entire damned thing and
partitioned the hell out of it.... (mine have both broken, FWIW).  Also
mention that bad disks and/or drives seem to be mutually contagious --
one will cause the other.

I think I can still recommend Jaz as a megafloppy, but not as archival
media.  Installing Linux to it works if you:
1. Have a full backup on tape.
2. Are just checking it out.
3. Like challenges <g>.

Service on replacement of defective media is relatively good (few
questions asked, 5-day shipment (pledged was 10), prepaid return via UPS
of old media).  I'm looking at tape solutions, recommendations welcomed.

Do I wish I had the grand (1 drive, 6 disks) to buy fixed disks and a
DAT drive?

    Use address above, or edit spam trap
    from reply address,when responding.

    What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?

Try using the guiutil.exe under DOS to reformat a badly behaved
Jaz disk....it fixed mine and haven't had a problem for over
a year now.

The Windows utilities won't work....the DOS one did....now
why am I not surprised.

Regards,
Chris

....stuff about Iomega....

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