Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ames!ucsd!rutgers!dptg!lzaz!hcj
From: hcj@lzaz.ATT.COM (HC Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Tos problems writing to harddisk
Summary: ST tos needed fixes for large (about 16meg partitions).
Message-ID: <769@lzaz.ATT.COM>
Date: 5 Sep 89 14:46:56 GMT
References: <23191@louie.udel.EDU>
Organization: AT&T ISL Lincroft NJ USA
Lines: 21

In article <23191@louie.udel.EDU>, SQ79%liverpool.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk (Mark Powell) writes:
> 
>    Tos has worked fine and been a VVVVEEEERRRRRYYYY useful utility for
> reading/writing to floppy... however, it doesn't seem to work to harddisk.

ST TOS has several bugs, and limitations as written.
The obvious ones:
	The size of the fat table can exceed 2^15 bytes.  This shows up
	the face that sbrk(signed short) and read(signed short) screw
	up bad.  LIBC isn't tuned for long integers.

	The location of the first data block under TOS is fixed by a 
	formulat different than in the TOS program.  This tends to 
	ruin file systems fast.

Some time past I posted a fix.  If you cant get it locally, I send it.

Howard C. Johnson
ATT Bell Labs
att!lzaz!hcj
hcj@lzaz.att.com