Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!Myron-Meier
From: Myron-Meier@cup.portal.com (Myron R Meier)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Can the FDC read a whole track (or two)?
Message-ID: <23320@cup.portal.com>
Date: 23 Oct 89 05:43:35 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 15


  I'm trying to add a track cache to the floppy driver for MINIX 1.2 and I was
wondering if the Floppy Disk Controller (FDC) in an IBM AT is capable of
reading a whole track, or maybe even two, at a time.  I'm afraid I don't have
access to any technical information on the FDC but I've been trying as best I
can to decode from the MINIX source code how to tell it how many sectors to
read.  As far as I can gather, the len array encodes how many sectors to read
given a particular sector size, but it doesn't seem to extent far enough for
a whole track (7680 bytes on a 1.2M floppy) and some of the possible sector
sizes seem rather odd (896 bytes?)  Any help in this area will be GREATLY
appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Myron
Myron-Meier@cup.portal.com