RISC iX - Cloned!

[Hopper]

There are some RISC iX floppies up on eBay at the moment: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/RISC-BBC-ACO ... 4190048250

Went for big money, was early on with a view to imaging the disks and making them available, but bidding went well beyond my budget for that.

[philpem]

There are some RISC iX floppies up on eBay at the moment: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/RISC-BBC-ACO ... 4190048250

Went for big money, was early on with a view to imaging the disks and making them available, but bidding went well beyond my budget for that.

I was looking at doing the same - alas bidding went way beyond my comfort limit too.

Seems to be the way things are going with Acorn stuff, sadly.

[Sniffer]

Possibly a silly question but how does one edit RISC iX files from RISC OS? Without removing the the disk and mounting on linux or such like. The filesystems appear readonly from RO.

[TimoHartong]

Just an update when putting the image with etcher on an SD ( micro ) SD card it is seen as disc where RISCOS is. So slow progress..

[BeebMaster]

I just found this set of instructions for Econet on RISC iX. At the January ABug we had quite a bit of trouble trying to get the RISC iX station to communicate with the net - unsuccessfully - so this may have helped if I'd have realised I already had it!

[TimoHartong]

Your administrator guide will help you to make the bridge between econet and ethernet. By the way an RiscIX will show itself on econet network.

[BeebMaster]

Oh yes oh yes:

[TimoHartong]

This is beautiful sight Econet with a riscix machine in the network displayed on a Sony Trinitron monitor.

[SteveBagley]

Just wondering if any other (earlier) versions of RISC iX had surfaced in a form that they could be installed?

Steve

[DutchAcorn]

I finally managed to get my Ethernet II podule working. RiscIX now boots all the way to a login prompt. Which suddenly means I need credentials.

I have browsed through the thread but I could not find the password for root, was that shared anywhere for the 4corn disk image?

Edit: solved this by booting without network and then changing the root password using the command

Code: Select all

passwd root

[philb]

Good work. It also wouldn't be that hard to patch the installation image to change the password to a known one before installing, though what you did is obviously easier after the fact.

Or crack.sh will brute-force it for $100 in a couple of days, if anybody wants to know what the original password was. I had a very quick go at it with John the Ripper and although it found the password for "guest" in about 200 milliseconds, it didn't come up with anything for root using the standard wordlist. My computer can only do about 20,000 keys per second so at that rate it will take hundreds of years to do an exhaustive search, probably not a winning option If anybody happens to have a better wordlist on hand then it might be interesting to try with that.

[Simon]

try adding Tal540bo to your word list

[philb]

[DutchAcorn]

I've been exploring Risc iX over the Easter holidays. It's a bit challenging finding information on network configuration.

Using an A5000 8MB with Acorn SCSI card and Ethernet II.

My main issue is right after booting. If ethernet is connected (cable plugged in) it hangs here:

I see packet transmission right before it hangs. Could it be waiting for some kind of response? Once every 20 times or so it does not hang at this point but continues to boot.

If I disconnect the ethernet cable until the disc checks start (and then plug back in) Risc iX always boots to a login prompt. I can then ping other computers, interface seems to work.

Any ideas what it is waiting for at that first initiation of the ethernet interface?

[DutchAcorn]

My main issue is right after booting. If ethernet is connected (cable plugged in) it hangs

I believe I found the cause. Using a SCSC2SD this does not occur. So I’m putting it down to an issue with the Quantum Fireball 500MB drives that I use.

[IanJeffray]

I downloaded the zip from : https://www.4corn.co.uk/articles/riscix121c/ . Extracted the zip on this R260 and copied it to an IDE podule with solid state from Ian ( I think )

Used the basic program it says on the end something in the line succesull. The discicon shows <unnamed> and when I try to access it I get an error message Disc not understood etc.

Interesting. I got the same error with that image on an R140, but I've half a dozen other iX images which boot just fine, and this image even runs ok in Arculator, so I'm a little puzzled why it would fail on real hardware, exactly in the way you describe - doesn't even show the RISC OS section properly. Did you ever resolve that?

EDIT: Resolved this by adding another SCSI drive on the bus. I think this may be slight flakyness with BlueSCSI/cabling/something. This image now runs fine for me - though no more interesting than other images, really.

[sirbod]

Could someone please confirm the RISC iX partition details for the 4corn disc image.

The non-ADFS partition descriptor in the first sector doesn't appear to match Acorn's documentation. For a valid RISC iX partition it states (PRM2-216):
&1FC (format identifier) = 1
&1FD / 1FE (partition start cylinder)

The 4corn image has a partition start cylinder of 1EC - which is 60MB into the disc (&1EC * 2 heads * 125 secspertrack) and &1FC=2 - which is an undocumented identifier. It also has the FileCore partition overlapping the RISC iX partition with the RISC iX area marked as used in the FileCore zones but not associated with a file. I would have expected the FileCore partition size to be 60MB, ending the cylinder before the RISC iX partition start cylinder.

Is this normal for RISC iX, a quirk of the 4corn disc image, or does the identifier and FileCore drive get altered when first booted to RISC iX?

[IanJeffray]

Could someone please confirm the RISC iX partition details for the 4corn disc image.

How can I confirm this? I have half a dozen '4corn' images (from various R260s at CFCH) and images from other sources, running from a BlueSCSI. I've also a 'real' original clunking RISCiX SCSI drive.

[sirbod]

How can I confirm this?

Try the following from BASIC - I'm not sure what FS it's on though.

Code: Select all

SYS "SCSIFS_DiscOp",,1,(4<<29)+&C00,&10000,512
*MEMORY B 101C0+40

[IanJeffray]

How can I confirm this?

Try the following from BASIC - I'm not sure what FS it's on though.

Code: Select all

SYS "SCSIFS_DiscOp",,1,4<<29,&10000,512
*MEMORY B 101C0+40

Trusting you quite a lot here not to nuke my SCSI with blind DiscOps

Just &00 &70 repeated throughout the whole report from *memory

I'm not actually sure which image this is, but it's one of flibble's 4corn ones anyway. (A silly Clive NSICT 'colonel' one) - need to open the machine to swap the image on BlueSCSI.

[sirbod]

Trusting you quite a lot here not to nuke my SCSI with blind DiscOps

Blind DiscOp

That DiscOp assumes the drive is SCSIFS::4, if it's something else, you'd need to change the SWI appropriately.

Just &00 &70 repeated throughout the whole report from *memory

My mistake, try the following:

Code: Select all

SYS "SCSIFS_DiscOp",,1,(4<<29)+&C00,&10000,512
*MEMORY B 101C0+40

[IanJeffray]

Blind DiscOp

Yes, blind, as I trust you enough to avoid digging around looking for SWI docs and reverse engineering your magic numbers!

Code: Select all

>SYS "SCSIFS_DiscOp",,1,(4<<29)+&C00,&10000,512
>*memory b 101c0+40

Address  : 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F :    ASCII Data
000101C0 : 09 7D 02 00 0D 0A 00 00 00 10 A1 00 21 02 00 00 : .}........¡.!...
000101D0 : 00 50 23 10 00 00 32 35 30 38 5F 30 38 30 37 00 : .P#...2508_0807.
000101E0 : 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 : ................
000101F0 : 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 EC 01 07 : .............ì..
>

EDIT: Noting that the drive shows in RISC OS as being 258MB, with 198MB used, so that does smell overlappy, right? (There's next to no 'RISC OS' data on the drive)

[sirbod]

That's identical to the 4corn image. I can only assume Acorn didn't follow the documentation, or someone made a mistake. The doc wording is:

bits 0 - 3 partition format identifier (1 -> RISC iX)

If that was misread that as "bit 1", it might explain why the identifier is 2 on the disc:

Code: Select all

000101F0 : 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 EC 01 07
                                                ^ should be 1

[timw]

That's identical to the 4corn image. I can only assume Acorn didn't follow the documentation, or someone made a mistake. The doc wording is:

bits 0 - 3 partition format identifier (1 -> RISC iX)

If that was misread that as "bit 1", it might explain why the identifier is 2 on the disc:

Code: Select all

000101F0 : 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 EC 01 07
                                                ^ should be 1

In my modified ST506 HForm-iX I wrote 1 as the identifier for the RISC iX region, based on the Acorn documentation (which I think was written with ST506 in mind). This seems to be accepted by RISC iX. However, looking at the scsidm source, this value is actually written as 2 when a SCSI disc is sectioned. Have a look at RO_371_src/Sources/Utilities/Patches/SCSIDM/src/h/partition where the following is defined (with the actual sectioning code in cmds.c):

Code: Select all

/* logical format identifier (stored in ADFS boot block) for this structure */
#define RISCiXDISCFORMAT (2)

So perhaps this value is different for ST506 and SCSI, or perhaps it was always supposed to be 2. It would be interesting to find the original st506form2 formatter to see what was written by that.

[IanJeffray]

I've just found a 'flibble' iX image that has the bytes 02 00 00 rather than 02 EC 01.
It's a 116MB image with a bunch of stuff in the RISC OS partition - uses the "SecureBoot" module ("Acorn Secure RISC iX filing system") to boot iX, rather than the usual "RISCiXFS" module. It's on my R140 at present and the module doesn't want to run - "Unknown machine hardware". Fun!

[IanJeffray]

It would be interesting to find the original st506form2 formatter to see what was written by that.

This?

Code: Select all

IF ((partcyl% AND &0F) = &0) THEN
 ERROR &01,"Disc does NOT contain a UNIX partition"
ELSE
 IF ((partcyl% AND &0F) <> &1) THEN
  ERROR &01,"Unrecognised UNIX partition format"
 ELSE
  partcyl% = (partcyl% >> 8)
  IF (partcyl% = &0000) THEN
   ERROR &01,"Invalid UNIX partition offset"
  ENDIF
 ENDIF
ENDIF

That'd be '1' then?

[timw]

It would be interesting to find the original st506form2 formatter to see what was written by that.

This?

Code: Select all

IF ((partcyl% AND &0F) = &0) THEN
 ERROR &01,"Disc does NOT contain a UNIX partition"
ELSE
 IF ((partcyl% AND &0F) <> &1) THEN
  ERROR &01,"Unrecognised UNIX partition format"
 ELSE
  partcyl% = (partcyl% >> 8)
  IF (partcyl% = &0000) THEN
   ERROR &01,"Invalid UNIX partition offset"
  ENDIF
 ENDIF
ENDIF

That'd be '1' then?

Yes! Thanks for posting that, I thought st506form2 had been lost. It should be used in preference to HForm-iX, for an authentic experience.

So yes, it looks like 1 is for RISC iX ST506 partitions, and 2 is for SCSI partitions.

[IanJeffray]

I thought st506form2 had been lost

That was in $.Library on one of flibble's R260 (SCSI) iX images.

[sirbod]

That'd be '1' then?

Yes, I believe all the images floating around are incorrect but work as I expect neither FileCore or RISC iX actually check the value. As it's not used for anything else as far as I'm aware, I'll check for either 1 or 2 and presume it's a RISC iX partition.

I've just found a 'flibble' iX image that has the bytes 02 00 00 rather than 02 EC 01.
It's a 116MB image with a bunch of stuff in the RISC OS partition - uses the "SecureBoot" module ("Acorn Secure RISC iX filing system") to boot iX, rather than the usual "RISCiXFS" module. It's on my R140 at present and the module doesn't want to run - "Unknown machine hardware". Fun!

I'd presumed the 1EC was read by either RISCiXFS or the Unix FS so is key, could it be reporting that error because the partition cylinder is 0?

[sirbod]

I've added RISC iX partition support to Partition Manager 0.88, currently read-only.

The structure was pulled from st506form2 and tested against the 4corn RISC iX image on a virtual ATA31 under Arculator, so hopefully works on tin. In theory it should also work for ADFS on an ST506, but I've not tested yet. I did test it against the 4corn image mounted under HDFFS on a RISC PC.