Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!spool.mu.edu!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!star.cs.vu.nl!sreiz From: sreiz@cs.vu.nl (Steven Reiz) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: What's the state with Minix and harddisks (Amiga) ? Keywords: bla Message-ID: <9788@star.cs.vu.nl> Date: 24 Apr 91 11:27:22 GMT References: Sender: news@cs.vu.nl Lines: 39 Frank.Neumann@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de (Frank Neumann) writes: >a 65 MBytes Seagate harddisk (via Omti-Controller). I heard that Commodore's >controller is already supported now, but that can't be all, can it ? Well, to be honest, yes, that's all, at this moment. Our current harddisk driver supports the Commodore A590 and will support the Commodore A3000, A2091 and A2090 (SCSI drives only) very very soon. Someone is working on a driver for GVP harddisks, and I'm confident that that driver is going to be a working product very soon as well. Several people are working on other drivers, but I cannot guarantee that those projects will ever produce something that works reliably. The major problem with harddisk drivers is not that they are very hard to write (generally they are not), but to obtain enough low-level information about the harddisk controller. If you can obtain that information somehow, for example by asking the manufacturer for it, I'm very sure that you could write your harddisk driver yourself, maybe with some help from us. The kind of information that you need is basically a list of offsets in the board controller, something like: offset: 3, size: byte, purpose: block count offset: 16, size: long, purpose: dma buffer pointer With complicated controllers, eg. SCSI, you often need some information about the protocol to use (in which order to access the registers, what to do in case of errors etc.) as well. I happen to have an OMTI (or at least some kind of ST506) controller myself so I would be very willing to help you out here and there if you, or someone else, could give us this information. So, GENERAL REQUEST! Does anyone out there have this information about OMTI or compatible ST506 controllers? Regards, Steven Reiz (sreiz@cs.vu.nl)