how to do a (floppy) diskless plan 9 install

From: "Boyd Roberts" <boyd@fr.inter.net>
Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 19:08:15 +0200
To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: [9fans] [mw]e wise [USB floppy] magic

in some fit of annoyance i pulled out old cd-rw backups (yeah,
optical!) of my other viao [coma].  here is the message that
russ sent me.  i just re-installed plan9.  qwerty typing on
azerty is a bit sporty but i'm getting good at it.

hats off to russ -- again!

----
From: "Russ Cox" <rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com>
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2001 01:15:00 -0500
To: <boyd@planete.net>
Subject: how to do a (floppy) diskless plan 9 install

Go to the web page, download a distribution floppy image.
Write the distribution floppy to a disk [sic].
Copy the files off the disk into c:\, the root
directory of your hard disk.

(I apologize for the circuitous route; it's 
tremendously easier than any alternatives.)

Edit c:\plan9.ini; add a line that says
 adisk=#S/sdC0/dos
assuming you are using an IDE drive.  If it's
SCSI, use sd00 instead of sdC0.

Similarly, change the line "bootfile=fd0!dos!9pcflop.gz"
to "bootfile=sdC0!dos!9pcflop.gz".

If the problem is that you have a USB floppy drive,
you should be able to put the dist floppy in the
drive and boot.  It will load the boot loader
from the floppy disk, but everything else from
the hard disk.

----------------------------------------------------------------
! at this point i had a dual boot system with '98, but read on !
----------------------------------------------------------------

If the problem is that you have no floppy drive
at all, download http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/ld.com
and, from a DOS-only prompt (i.e., NOT a DOS window
inside Windows, but when only DOS is running),
type "ld sdC0!dos!9load".  That should start the
boot loader, which will load the kernel from your
hard drive.

Everything should proceed as normal from here.

When you finish the installation, you will need
to remove or rename c:\plan9.ini; otherwise the
installation program will boot when you try to boot
the newly installed system.

If you run into trouble, let me know.
Russ