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Banyan Vines 8.5?

Posted: 8. Dec 2013, 14:08
by Kumba
So it looks like Virtual Box 4.3.4 is booting my old OSes again. I got NetWare 4.2 + two MS-DOS 7.10 VMs to all boot together and do some good old-fashioned IPX networking (including logging in as admin). Even ran two copies of Quake in IPX mode!

Then I went for my next experiment: Banyan Vines 8.5. It can be easily found via Google, so I fetched the install floppies and it looks like it can find the disk drive and install the base files. Then it tries to reboot to finish the install, but it is unable to mount the root filesystem. It looks like BV 8.5 is running a variant of UNIX from the System V 3.2 era. I have tried SCSI, both LsiLogic and BusLogic emulation, as well as straight IDE. Vines is unable to boot directly from disk in all three cases, but the installer can definitely see the disk and work with it.

Some digging around suggests that the installer is using direct BIOS calls to use the disk, but upon reboot, it uses something else and this is failing. The best hit I have had so far is the last message in this thread:
I finally got it working (almost), except for a slight problem towards the end, which I have been unable to solve. I have written a how-to on installing it, based on what I've managed to figure out. It turns out to be an LBA and BIOS disk cylinder size issue. I will be making the how-to available to anyone who wants it.
Except I have no idea what the LBA and cylinder size issues are, and that guy appears to never have posted his HOW-TO in a public location. I don't even know if they can be fixed in VBox. He doesn't identify what VM software he was using that allowed him to get farther, nor what his error was (same as mine?).

Thoughts?

Re: Banyan Vines 8.5?

Posted: 8. Dec 2013, 19:47
by mpack
I assume the mention of LBA and cylinder count is a hint that your old software can't handle large modern disk sizes. The old cylinder/head/sector (CHS) addressing scheme maxes out around 8GB, so if the guest doesn't understand LBA then you'd be in trouble. LBA itself maxes out at 2TB.

You don't mention what size you made the disk, and I have no way of knowing what size your application needs. But, try making it no larger then a good spec drive from back in the day.

Re: Banyan Vines 8.5?

Posted: 9. Dec 2013, 06:16
by Kumba
mpack wrote:I assume the mention of LBA and cylinder count is a hint that your old software can't handle large modern disk sizes. The old cylinder/head/sector (CHS) addressing scheme maxes out around 8GB, so if the guest doesn't understand LBA then you'd be in trouble. LBA itself maxes out at 2TB.

You don't mention what size you made the disk, and I have no way of knowing what size your application needs. But, try making it no larger then a good spec drive from back in the day.
Sorry about that. I tried several sizes, the largest being 2GB (recognizing the age of the OS and that most 90's-era OSes maxed out at 2GB), then tried 1GB, then tried ~720MB. In all cases, the Vines 8.5 installer can work with the disk, format it, install system files, and setup the kernel. But when it tries to boot from the disk, it's able to load the kernel but then fails to mount /root. I am not sure if it's not able to recognize the VBox IDE driver or both SCSI emulations. Seems to be a recognized problem, but Google offers nothing more than that one forum post that I cited.

Re: Banyan Vines 8.5?

Posted: 9. Dec 2013, 15:17
by michaln
Kumba wrote:Sorry about that. I tried several sizes, the largest being 2GB (recognizing the age of the OS and that most 90's-era OSes maxed out at 2GB), then tried 1GB, then tried ~720MB.
720MB is still too big for IDE because it will still force geometry translation. Only with a ~500MB or smaller disk will the BIOS geometry match the physical disk geometry. You can check the reported CHS geometries in the VBox.log file.

Of course the real reason why the guest OS isn't booting could be something different... sometimes old OSes don't boot on halfway modern physical hardware either.

Re: Banyan Vines 8.5?

Posted: 10. Dec 2013, 17:51
by Kumba
michaln wrote:720MB is still too big for IDE because it will still force geometry translation. Only with a ~500MB or smaller disk will the BIOS geometry match the physical disk geometry. You can check the reported CHS geometries in the VBox.log file.
Hmm, okay, that's something to try out once I give up on installing NetWare 5.1. Believe it or not, it's Java fighting me trying to install that NOS in Vbox 4.3.4. Can't believe Novell abandoned the good old text installer for this lame Java installer that triggers page faults.

michaln wrote:Of course the real reason why the guest OS isn't booting could be something different... sometimes old OSes don't boot on halfway modern physical hardware either.
Well, it looks like with Banyan, the kernel was definitely booting, but it dropped into the Vines kernel debugger once it was unable to mount root, and I'm not real keen on trying to play inside of a panic'ed system. Vines itself is based on a UNIX System V 3.2 release of some kind, judging from some of the messages it printed out. Copyright dates suggested at least 1997-1998, so not that ancient. Not like, say, NetWare 286 :)

Edit: Forgot to add, Vines won't let me install on 512MB or less disks. Tried that one, too, and the installer actually errors out in that case.

Re: Banyan Vines 8.5?

Posted: 10. Dec 2013, 17:59
by michaln
Kumba wrote:Well, it looks like with Banyan, the kernel was definitely booting, but it dropped into the Vines kernel debugger once it was unable to mount root, and I'm not real keen on trying to play inside of a panic'ed system. Vines itself is based on a UNIX System V 3.2 release of some kind, judging from some of the messages it printed out. Copyright dates suggested at least 1997-1998, so not that ancient. Not like, say, NetWare 286 :)
SVR 3.2 is actually really old (late 1980s), but Banyan must have kept it somewhat uptodate if your version is from the late 1990s. Then again I don't know how much of SVR 3.2 is really in Vines.

Anyway... I might be able to take a look at this, but don't have Vines. If you're willing to help, please PM me.

Re: Banyan Vines 8.5?

Posted: 10. Dec 2013, 19:12
by Kumba
michaln wrote:SVR 3.2 is actually really old (late 1980s), but Banyan must have kept it somewhat uptodate if your version is from the late 1990s. Then again I don't know how much of SVR 3.2 is really in Vines.

Anyway... I might be able to take a look at this, but don't have Vines. If you're willing to help, please PM me.
Sure, would love to help. I did find this page for Vines 8.5 on VMWare (must've missed it in my initial searching), and it has this to say about configuring the guest properties (it also has the five floppy images up at the top):
Memory: 88MB (96MB is the maximum, due to System V limitations)
The Hard Disk MUST be 0.4GB or less, and MUST be IDE for this to work.
Those are easy enough to do in VBox. But this bit doesn't appear to be:
3. Start the virtual machine, and press and hold the F2 key to enter BIOS setup

Select Primary Master, and set Type to User. IMPORTANT: Set Cylinders to 1023 or installation will fail after the first reboot. Set "LBA Mode Control" to Disabled and 32 Bit I/O to Disabled (if these aren't disabled, the system will bail out with an srmount error and a kernel panic).
That last bit is EXACTLY what I am getting, the srmount error and subsequent panic. As far as I know, there's no BIOS configuration screen within the guest BIOS, all edits are done to the XML files stored in the guest's directory. Now, I haven't gone through all of the XML schemas to figure out what one can edit manually and not via the GUI, so does VBox support anything like what VMWare can do? Note: I cannot run VMware on my current system. There's some...conflict, not sure what, that triggers random BSoDs. It's apparently a known issue in VMPlayer 9 and I'm not going to bother looking for a fix. You guys fixed NW support in 4.3.4, so I am pretty happy to stick w/ VBox now (qemu for anything really insane).

Re: Banyan Vines 8.5?

Posted: 11. Dec 2013, 01:51
by michaln
Kumba wrote:3. Start the virtual machine, and press and hold the F2 key to enter BIOS setup
Indeed there is no such thing in VirtualBox.
Select Primary Master, and set Type to User. IMPORTANT: Set Cylinders to 1023 or installation will fail after the first reboot. Set "LBA Mode Control" to Disabled and 32 Bit I/O to Disabled (if these aren't disabled, the system will bail out with an srmount error and a kernel panic).
I really wonder what the "Set Cylinders to 1023" bit is about. I strongly suspect that only part of this is necessary, and with a sufficiently small disk it shouldn't be relevant.
(qemu for anything really insane).
Ha :)

Re: Banyan Vines 8.5?

Posted: 11. Dec 2013, 04:45
by Kumba
michaln wrote:
Select Primary Master, and set Type to User. IMPORTANT: Set Cylinders to 1023 or installation will fail after the first reboot. Set "LBA Mode Control" to Disabled and 32 Bit I/O to Disabled (if these aren't disabled, the system will bail out with an srmount error and a kernel panic).
I really wonder what the "Set Cylinders to 1023" bit is about. I strongly suspect that only part of this is necessary, and with a sufficiently small disk it shouldn't be relevant.
So setting the main disk drive to 409MB allows me to get past the srmount panic, so the LBA thing and 32bit I/O thing isn't needed. However, I die at the exact same spot as that GoogleDoc writeup says, where the /install/fullinstall script expects an argument. And back in 2009, another VBox user hit this spot as well. The last bit of reference I can find is from a Russian site (Google translation) that indicates there is a Vines 8.5 CD-ROM out there that the fullinstall script is looking for. That might be hard to hunt down. There isn't even any listings on eBay for Vines installation media.

Re: Banyan Vines 8.5?

Posted: 11. Dec 2013, 05:04
by Kumba
Actually, it doesn't appear to be the lack of a CDROM image w/ software....although I suspect I will run into that if I can get past this. As the previous VBox forum thread indicated, that install script is checking for Compaq hardware using some kind of test, which apparently fails on virtualized hardware. So I thought I could mount each of the floppy disks until I found this script and then edit it out, however, the floppy images are not in standard MS-DOS VFAT format, as far as I can tell, as neither Lubuntu 13.x or Windows 98 can read them.

I guess I'll how to find a way to mount the Vines VDI file in Linux somehow, once I reconfigure the Linux kernel to understand the Vines partition format and filesystem.

Oh well, if I can't get this to work at all, I do have this Xenix image to play with :)

Re: Banyan Vines 8.5?

Posted: 11. Dec 2013, 08:53
by Kumba
Kumba wrote:I guess I'll how to find a way to mount the Vines VDI file in Linux somehow, once I reconfigure the Linux kernel to understand the Vines partition format and filesystem.
And so I discover the ONE filesystem format that Linux does NOT understand. Surprise, surprise...

Looks like I'll need to install Solaris or SCO UnixWare, and I don't know if that's worth the effort.

Re: Banyan Vines 8.5?

Posted: 11. Dec 2013, 15:26
by michaln
Kumba wrote:So setting the main disk drive to 409MB allows me to get past the srmount panic, so the LBA thing and 32bit I/O thing isn't needed.
For all I know, it's not really needed in VMware either... though it might. Our general policy is that we don't add knobs for users to mess with unless it solves some known problem :)
... indicates there is a Vines 8.5 CD-ROM out there that the fullinstall script is looking for. That might be hard to hunt down. There isn't even any listings on eBay for Vines installation media.
I see... no longer a virtualization problem :) BTW if Solaris 10 or 11 can read those floppies or disks, that's not terribly hard to get or install. Much easier than UnixWare for sure.

Re: Banyan Vines 8.5?

Posted: 23. May 2018, 05:45
by 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