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From: cwr@pnet01.cts.com (Will Rose)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Drive damage and bootblok.s
Message-ID: <6786@crash.cts.com>
Date: 8 Jan 91 11:16:13 GMT
Sender: news@crash.cts.com
Organization: People-Net [pnet01], El Cajon CA
Lines: 28


 
I've been running 1.2->1.5 on the same XT clone for two or three years now;
my guess is ~500 boot cycles.  The A drive is a Teac 360K, and I've never
liked the racket the boot process made, kicking it around.  However, the
drive has never shown any signs of trouble, and continues to read and
write floppies generated in other machines.  (I've patched floppy.c to tell
it that A is a 360, and B is a 1.44, and to accept no substitutes after the
boot process).  I tried shoelace a while back, and it did what it did very
well, but for some reason I find it more convenient to boot DOS by default,
and Minix from a floppy, having patched menu.c to skip the keypress.
 
I grabbed Kenneth Hendrickson's recent bootblok(s) off the net, and the
silence is wonderful.  Like the alternative HD drivers, this should become
part of the standard distribution; although the distributed kernel needs
the current, more general code.
 
My thanks to Ken - Will
 
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