Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!gryphon!crash!pnet01!jca
From: jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: hard drives again...
Message-ID: <4532@crash.cts.com>
Date: 2 Jul 89 06:16:31 GMT
Sender: news@crash.cts.com
Organization: People-Net [pnet01], El Cajon CA
Lines: 36

I just installed Minix 1.3 for a friend of mine and I ran into that nasty
> 65535 partition offset problem.  Also, I would like to know what I need to
do to make fsck work with a drive with 5 heads.  The offending drive is a
Miniscribe 6053 (5 heads, 1024 tracks, MFM formatted).  I got Minix working
with no problems after stuffing his primary DOS partition and Minix 1.3 in a
32 Mb space on his hard drive.  21 Mb (roughly) is his DOS 3.30 partition now
and the rest of up to the 65535 boundary is Minix.  I more'd and fgrepped fsck
for a define macro for 'head' and 'HEAD', no luck.  In the users' guide it
mentions that fsck would have to be modified and recompiled, will how does one
go about doing this?  I want to know for two reasons;
 
1. Roughly 12 Mb of that Miniscribe is dead space.  I would like to stuff 
   PC-DOS 3.30 on a 32 Mb partition and happily give Minix 1.3 the rest (as
   would he).
 
2. I'm getting ready to shop around for another drive, and I don't want to
   slay the same dragon twice.

So any insight on how to modify the various file system utilities (if they
need modification) for other than 4 headed hard drives and getting rid of that
partition offset beast will be most appreciated by two people.  Me, and a new
Minix user.  
 
Also, a happy side note, besides my complaint report and help ad, it seems
that the NCL AT FD/HD controller works.  Also, mkfs doesn't seem to need any
modifications to work with 'odd' headed drives.  It makes the file system with
no complaints if the file system being made is in the first 32 Mb space of the
hard drive.

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