Installing Xenix 2.x on Qemu

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Revision as of 18:58, 6 August 2011 by Neozeed (talk | contribs)
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Xenix 2.3.4 on Qemu

As of Qemu 0.14.0 you can actually install Xenix version 2. This works for both the i386 & the i286 versions.

I've documented it here on my blog.

The whole thing hinges on changing the boot strings so that instead of detecting the media type, it is instead forced to use the actual media type. For example, using the 3 1/2 inch diskette the boot string goes from:

fd(64)xenix root=fd(64) swap=ram(0) pipe=ram(1) swplo=0 nswap=1000 ronly

Into this:

fd(60)xenix root=fd(60) swap=ram(0) pipe=ram(1) swplo=0 nswap=1000 ronly

Things to keep in mind is that the largest IDE hard disk that Xenix 2.x can support is 500MB.

media table

  • fd0135 2 60
  • fd0135ds18 2 60
  • fd0135ds9 2 36
  • fd048 2 4
  • fd048ds8 2 12
  • fd048ds9 2 4
  • fd048ss8 2 8
  • fd048ss9 2 0
  • fd096 2 52
  • fd096ds15 2 52
  • fd096ds18 2 60
  • fd096ds9 2 36

Hopefully this will make some sense, until I remember how to make a table in mediawiki, but it's device, major/minor.