Make Boot Options Permanent
Note: This tip is recommended for advanced users only. You shouldn't
use any of these options unless you already know what they mean and have
some idea what their impact might be.
As described above, the R4.5 Boot Options menu makes it even easier to boot
BeOS on funky hardware or in unique situations. If it turns out that you
need to invoke one of these options every time you boot (which is rare),
you can make these options permanent. In fact, using the techniques
outlined below, you can enable a number of features that don't
appear in the Boot Options menu.
Use the Tracker to browse through
/boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/sample and you'll find
the following files:
ata.sample
atapi.sample
awe64
kernel.sample
vesa.sample
Open any of these files in a text editor, and you'll find analogs to the
parameters offered in the Boot Options menu, and then some. Most of them
are relatively self-explanatory, and the files are well commented, so you
should be able to determine what most of them do just by poking around. If
you want to activate an option in one these files, copy the file to
/boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers (i.e., copy the file one
directory up), rename the file without the .sample extension, and
uncomment (remove the "#" from) any lines you want to activate.
Warning: Don't change parameters in these files "just to see what
will happen." While many of the options are innocuous, some of them can
have serious consequences. Change only the options you understand, or those
you've been instructed to modify by Be technical support staff. If you get
yourself into a jam, use the Emergency Boot Procedure outlined in The
BeOS Bible to boot from CD and re-comment any lines you've enabled, or
remove the file entirely.
ata.sample
This file can be used to force DMA (direct memory access) on or off for
specific physical hard drives in your system. This can be useful with
certain configurations in which DMA confuses the boot process. In addition,
some ATAPI CD-ROM burners won't work with DMA turned on.
Whereas the DMA options in the Boot Options menu only let you turn DMA on
or off for all drives attached to your system, using this file lets you be
more specific. Drives can be identified in a number of ways: by serial
number, by identifier string, by bus number, by device address, or by
firmware string. Drive identification happens in the
match {
}
block. Once identified, you can use the
use {
}
block to tell that drive to use (forcedma) or not to use (nodma) DMA. For
example, a file that looks like this:
matchdevices {
match {
# model number (usually displayed by BIOS during boot)
model "WDC AC36400L"
}
use {
nodma
}
}
will force DMA off for the drive identifying itself as "WDC AC36400L." If
you need help determining the identifying strings for your drives, use the
ideinfo tool in
/optional/experimental/diagnostics.
atapi.sample
This file functions identically to ata.sample, but its effects
apply only to ATAPI CD-ROM devices.
awe64
If you have an AWE64 sound card but can't seem to get any sound out of it,
the card may be set to a nonstandard IRQ or DMA address. While the default
settings work in the vast majority of situations, some users will have to
specify these addresses. Edit this file with the correct address, move it
up a directory, and restart your machine.
In case you're wondering why these settings aren't simply established from
the Devices preferences panel, keep in mind that the Devices panel is for
configuring PCI and Plug and Play devices only, while this file is for a
hard-wired ISA, non-PnP card. The Devices panel lets you configure the Plug
and Play system so that hard-wired cards won't get knocked out by the
Configuration Manager. Remember also that the Devices panel is unlike
Windows' Device Manager in that it does not associate drivers with specific
hardware; it merely reserves resources for particular types of hardware.
The AWE64 is ISA-based and is not PnP, so it cannot be configured from the
Devices panel, even though it requires that the OS know about its
resources. Be could have written a graphical control panel for cards like
the AWE64, but there wasn't time to do so before R4.5 had to ship to the CD
duplication plant.
Note: If you're using a non-PnP AWE32 card, you may be able to get sound working as well, by using the SoundBlaster16 compatibility mode. Download the third-party SoundBlaster16 driver from BeWare and follow its installation instructions. Create a text file in /boot/home/config/settings called sb16_settings including your card's settings. For example, yours might simply read:
A220 I5 D1 H7 P330
Follow the instructions above for the AWE64 file, keeping the AWE64 file name. Reboot your machine and open the Media preferences panel. You should see two audio devices: sb16 and awe64. Choose awe64, and you should have working sound. If you need to record with this card, you'll need to enable "Real-Time Audio." Note that this technique is not supported by Be. BeOS does not officially support the SB16, for performance reasons.
kernel.sample
Several of the options in kernel.sample mirror the choices shown
in the Boot Options menu.
This file will also let you enable Advanced Power Management (APM) for some
motherboards, as well as software power-down (i.e., when you select
Shutdown from the Be menu, your machine will physically turn itself off).
However: These options work only with certain BIOSes, and even then,
only with certain revisions of those BIOSes. With some motherboards,
enabling these options may render the machine unbootable from hard disk. If
this happens to you, use the Emergency Boot Procedure outlined in The
BeOS Bible to boot from CD and re-comment any lines you've enabled, or
remove the file entirely. You may also want to visit your motherboard
manufacturer's Web site and obtain the latest BIOS update, then try the APM
options in BeOS again.
Finally, this file will let you specify nonstandard ports (e.g., to use COM
ports rather than serial ports) for boot-time debugging, or have all debug
output written to the system's syslog.
vesa.sample
As with the Boot Options menu, editing this file will let you select a
permanent video mode for unsupported graphics chip sets. Its only options
are:
mode width height depth
so you might want to edit this file to read:
mode 800 600 16
Note: It's important that there be no extra white space in this
file. Make sure you haven't left spaces at the end of the line, and that
you don't insert any new, blank lines into the file. If you can't get the
vesa file to do its thing, double-check for extra white space.
virtual memory
You can use the virtual_memory file to establish a smaller or
larger swap file than the GUI Virtual Memory preferences panel will allow.
Note that setting your swap file to a lower size than recommended will
probably impact performance and is not recommended.
Making Boot Floppies
As always, it's a good idea to make a backup copy of your BeOS boot floppy,
in case you ever need to get yourself out of a jam. Doing so is much easier
in R4.5 than it was in previous versions of the OS. Just insert a floppy,
open a Terminal window, and type:
makebootfloppy -cd
This will create a boot floppy capable of booting either from your hard
disk or from the BeOS CD. If you leave off the -cd flag, the
floppy will be created much more quickly, but will only be capable of
booting from your hard disk. If you want to create a floppy that boots only
from a specific partition, use the -base flag, e.g.:
makebootfloppy -base /gorgonzola
This floppy will attempt to boot from your /gorgonzola partition,
even if it's not your main boot partition. You can also use the
-preserve option to leave a copy of the boot image in
/tmp (this is valid only when used with the -cd flag).
If you want to write a boot image to some sort of removable media, such as
a Zip or LS-120 drive, use the undocumented -image flag. For
example:
makebootfloppy -cd -image /dev/disk/ide/atapi/0/slave/0/raw
Alternatively, if you want to create an image from an existing floppy
rather than from the boot image on your hard drive, you can simply use:
cat /dev/disk/floppy/raw > image.img
and then write image.img to a new floppy with:
cat image.img > /dev/disk/floppy/raw
This is a good way to get around having to remember all of the dd
commands described in The BeOS Bible.
If you need to make the floppy from within Windows, insert the BeOS CD and
a floppy and navigate to Win95/BeOS on the CD. Click Make.bat and
sit back.
