Banyan VINES?

[JQW]

I don't suppose anyone has tried installing this OS under VirtualBox yet?

I used to work with this system many years ago, and would like to see it agai. Due to the fact that earlier versions the system used hardware dongles for protection, the lowest version for practical installation will probably be version 7 which was the first to replace the dongles with activation keys. As yet I've not managed to locate working media for such a version, but I'm still looking.

[JQW]

I've now managed to locate working media for VINES 8.5, but it's not that stable. VirtualBox does at least boot off the first floppy image, but will crash soon into the second disk, either when initially probing the hard drive, or later on when attempting to query the partition table. This is irrespective of configuring the drive as ATA or SCSI.

[vbox4me2]

Crash messages? boot info/config?

[JQW]

Disabling VT-X seems to have fixed it - at least I've managed to get to the disk utilities menu, which is further than I've got before. It's now stuck there doing a surface scan - there was an undocumented menu option here to bypass the scan, but I've forgotten it!

[JQW]

I've hit another problem. After the first reboot (which needs to be done manually) it can't find the CD-Rom drive. I'm pretty certain that CD support was SCSI only, unless you installed an updated IDE driver which had to be downloaded from Banyan. As they don't exist any more, I'm going to have to do some digging to find it. There is an option to install the rest of the OS from floppies, but I can't recall seeing this particular release on floppies back then.

[JQW]

I now know which driver I need to support IDE CD-ROMs - it's the supplementary set of drivers from Compaq, which contained around a dozen different storage device drivers. This set includes a revised IDE driver which should work with all IDE interfaces.

There were several cuts of this driver set over the years, and I'm not sure which version was the last to be released. Suffice to say I've yet to find any version online.

[JQW]

I've located the driver floppy - it was buried deep on HP's website. However when attempting to load it into the kernel configuration tool via VirtualBox this particular driver is ignored. I've looked into the driver installation script, and the installation will only proceed if a small binary runs without error. It seems that this binary checks to see if it's being installed on genuine Compaq hardware, probably by looking for a NIC with a valid MAC address.

I'll have a go at amending the floppy's installation script to remove this test in due course.

[ISV]

I'm trying to install Vines 8.5 and I have too many problems with it.
After passing the "Password Installation Menu" gives this error:

/ install / fullinstall: test: argument expected
Error occured during installation ... Installation Aborted.

and that I did not always stop at this place ...

JQW, you got to set it up?

[DrScriptt]

Here's a new post with details on how to get Banyan VINES 8.5 installed and running in VirtualBox 5.1.36.
- Banyan VINES 8.5 boots and runs in VB 5.1.36

[socratis]

Thread opened:         2009-08-02, 17:53
Thread last reply:     2009-09-25, 08:39
ISV last visited:      2009-12-18, 08:04
JQW last visited:      2012-01-16, 22:43
vbox4me2 last visited: 2012-02-03, 10:25

Don't you think that it's a little too late for this thread? I can see the 3 other threads that you also "raised from the dead", but this is way too old, way past the statute of limitations...

Locking (at least) this one.
(otherwise I won't be able to sleep at night )