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From: nall@sun8.scri.fsu.edu (John Nall)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: ESDI disk with Minix
Message-ID: <959@sun13.scri.fsu.edu>
Date: 4 Oct 90 17:09:06 GMT
Sender: news@sun13.scri.fsu.edu
Reply-To: nall@sun8.scri.fsu.edu (John Nall)
Organization: Supercomputer Computations Research Institute
Lines: 40

>  From wjb@cogsci.cog.jhu.edu Thu Oct  4 12:50:41 1990
>  To: nall@sun8.scri.fsu.edu
>  Subject: Re: Minix with an ESDI disk 
>  In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 04 Oct 90 13:52:57 +0000.
>               <9010041549.AA02508@cogsci.cog.jhu.edu> 
>  Date: Thu, 04 Oct 90 12:55:20 EDT
>
>  John,
>  
>  	That is VERY interesting.  I had been told that ESDI, MFM, and RLL
>  controllers were basically the same, but wanted confirmation of that.
>  What controller/disk did you use and did you have to make ANY changes to
>  Minix at all?  You might consider posting the response to this message
>  as I expect others may be interested as well.  Now, I may be able to
>  get rid of my 65 & 120 Megabyte RLL drives and get some REAL storage capacity.
>  
>  				Bill Bogstad
>  
>  

(As requested, this is posted rather than just replied to...)

Bill:
	The controller is a WD1007V.  I'm not absolutely sure who manufactures
the disk itself (I'm at work, and it is at home), but the documentation on the
controller states that it "interfaces two ESDI-compatible hard disk drives to
a PC-AT system processor", so I guess it is pretty standard.

	No, I did not have to make any changes to Minix at all.  I might add
that my previous disk was an RLL, and 1.5.10 also ran on that with no changes.

	Since the first note, however, I *have* experienced one annoying problem.
Dosread no longer works with the harddisk!  It says "cluster size too big" and
"Can't handle disk".  Since I can transfer all my files using either the 1.2
meg floppy or the 1.44 meg floppy, this is not really a problem, but just a minor
irration.  I'll have to look at dosread.c later and see what is going on.
--
John W. Nall		| Supercomputation Computations Research Institute
nall@sun8.scri.fsu.edu  | Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306
 "Real programmers can write assembly code in any language." - Larry Wall