Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!hubcap!ncrcae!ncr-sd!crash!pnet01!jca
From: jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Problems (mkfs and > 10000 block file systems)...
Message-ID: <4594@crash.cts.com>
Date: 10 Jul 89 04:56:09 GMT
Sender: news@crash.cts.com
Organization: People-Net [pnet01], El Cajon CA
Lines: 38

I puttered around with my friend's Miniscribe 6053 and Minix 1.3 and I found
this nice problem in giving the /usr file system a 20 Mb partition.  mkfs
coughs on file systems > 10000 blocks.  It will not create them.  Do I have to
use a prototype file or what?  I removed /dev/hd[0-4] to make sure I had block
special files with infinite sizes and no dice...mkfs coughed again.  I went
snooping around mkfs.c for something like...
 
#define NR_BLOCKS
 
I found N_BLOCKS, and that's set to 32000.  So mkfs is written (I assume) to
handle file systems up to 32000 blocks (or zones).  The partition table isn't
big enough to handle several 10 Mb file systems, especially if you have a big
drive such as an ST4096 and you want to give Minix 40 Mb for /usr or something
like that with your huge hard drive.
 
40 Mb hard drives are becoming cheaper all the time...if there are any patches
out there to make the file system utilities work with huge file systems and
building file systems at a relative sector > 65535 I would like to hear from
you.  One of the reasons I have taken it upon myself to install Minix on my
friend's Miniscribe 6053 is because of the fact I'm going to be in the market
for a large hard drive (by Minix's standards) soon.  Minix (like Unix) is
space, especially for applying patches and recompilation.
 
And now a bug report...
 
Minix 1.3 will work with the NCL FD/HD controller providing you don't use
Minix's fdisk.  Apparently the NCL controller has a difficult time writing
absolute sectors.  My advice to anybody who is looking for a drive controller,
play it safe, get a real Western Digital!  Fortunately my friend has a WD
controller and it worked just fine.

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