SCO OS 5.0.7 on Qemu

Hi everybody.

This time of the year allows me to experiment with things that otherwyse
I woulnd't have the time play with; during the last few days I gave Qemu
0.8.0 + kqemu (running on SuSE Linux 10) a try. I was able to install
and successfully use Windows XP and I wanted to give SCO OS 5.0.7 a run.

I started with a 300MB memory allocation and by creating a virtual disk
of 2GB; when I booted from the CD, I was able to get to the boot: prompt
but, after depicting the usual dots, I ended up having a blank screen
instead of the "laundry list" of devices.

Qemu is able to emulate an old Cirrus Logic board and, since
I was aware of the OSS653A patch (the initial VGA recognition
supplement) so I tried to add it as a BTLD driver (which worked fine)
but again I ended up with a blank screen.

So I gave OSS661A a try and I was able to get to the laundry list but I
had a "WARNING: hd: no root disk controller was found".

This is strange since Qemu is able to emulate a simple IDE/EIDE
controller; the CD-ROM interface the installed detect is the real
/dev/cdrom device under Linux and the HD is an ATA-2 2GB HD configured
as ata0/master.

I tried with "defbootstr Sdsk=wd(0,0,0) link=invd prompt" but that gave
me a panic during the hd_config stage.

So I downloaded the WD supplement from SCO's FTP site and tried to use
it using the

link="invd wd"

bootstring. The loader correctly prompted me to replace the existing
"wd" driver but, again, I ended up having a "no root disk controller was
found".

The laundry list reported

adaptec 0x0170-0x0177 15 - type=IDE ctlr=secondary drv=wd

which is the secondary IDE controller but failed to report the primary
(which is/should be at 0x1F0 - IRQ 14). I tried again by telling the
loader to search for a "wd" adapter here:

adapter=wd(0x1F0,14,0)

but unsuccessfully.

Has anyone tried the above ?

I'm pretty sure that (again - and he will be more than welcome :-) Bela
will jump ip, scare me to death and provide a simple solution...

Happy New Year to everybody,
Roberto

--
Roberto Zini - r.zini<@AT@>strhold.it
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