DOS Merge Under AIX 1.3
>AIX complains that disk 1 has no AIX partition. Sure don't. When I run mount, I get /dev/hdx, 1-6. With all these minidisks, how can I find out what the external drive is?

Rick Ekblaw uttered the following under the influence:
   Surprise!  It doesn't have a device name assigned to it -- yet.  I've been looking into this problem for a while now, and I think that I have an approach that will work.

First, I made a DOS primary partition on my AIX boot drive (I had about 60MB of free space, and gave DOS FDISK all that it would take).  I initially used PC-DOS 5.02, but since the AIX 1.3 DOS Merge only "supports" up to DOS 5.00, I had trouble reading the C:\DOS directory using dosdir, so I reformatted with DOS 5.00.  This lets me select the "Boot DOS" option from the AIX boot menu, and I was able to verify that DOS could see the 2.1GB SCSI hard drive I had in my 3510-0V0 external box.  I'll warn you now that AIX was unhappy with my DOS 5-compatible 2GB  primary DOS partition on the external drive.  I reduced that partition to 770MB, but I don't think that the value is too critical as long as it is not taking more than the AIX minidisks command can handle, *and* you have space for AIX to write it's "signature".  At this point I had a DOS C: drive and a D: drive.

Boot AIX, log on as root and run the minidisks command.  It will ask if you want to make the second hard drive usable under AIX, say yes.  Then select the show option, and you'll see the DOS disks (my hdisk0 C: drive was called dd03, and my hdisk2 D: drive was called dd21).  Exit minidisks.

At this point, you can probably issue a command "dosdir -D /dev/ddc" and get a listing of the contents of the C: root directory.  However, a "dosdir -D /dev/ddd" failed (at least for me).  The DOS Merge system is not really set up yet, time to try to fix that.

Take your 3 720K PC-DOS 5.00 floppies out of the vault, blow the dust off them, and prepare to "install" DOS 5.00 under AIX DOS Merge.  Issue the command "/usr/lib/merge/dosinstall", select the DOS 5.0 option, select drive A, and follow the prompts to insert the three DOS diskettes.  After the DOS diskettes are installed, you can issue the command "dos", and your screen will change to a C> prompt.  You end the dos session with the famous "three finger salute" (how else?).

Now issue the commands "ln /dev/dd03 /dev/dosdsk0" and "ln /dev/dd21 /dev/dosdsk1" to link the minidisks to the logical device names used by DOS under AIX.  Now "cd /aixps2/merge", and 
"dosopt +ae:=\dev\dosdsk0 /etc/dosenv.def" to fix the virtual E: drive definition. Now issue the "dos" command, and you should find that your "C:" drive is the AIX /aixps2/merge directory, your "D:" drive is the AIX root directory, the "E:" drive is your DOS C: drive, and the "F:" drive is your DOS D: drive.  Now copying files is easy... change the current drive to "D:", CD to the appropriate directory, and COPY all you want to "F:".

There's still a bunch of the DOS Merge stuff that still is either not set up right, not working right, or something.  At least this will let you copy the MAN pages to a DOS-compatible drive without having to use floppies.  Note that the copies are binary, so the text files have LFs instead of CRLFs, but most DOS editors (including PC-DOS 5 EDIT) can handle that.  I seem to recall a simple DOS filter program called CRLF.COM (or something like that) that would convert single
LF characters into a CRLF pair -- that program is probably on the SimTel DOS utilities archive.
 


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