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From: arthur@warwick.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Hard Disk Problem ( and some more bugs )
Message-ID: <496@ubu.warwick.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 24-Feb-87 19:09:18 EST
Article-I.D.: ubu.496
Posted: Tue Feb 24 19:09:18 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 28-Feb-87 06:11:50 EST
Reply-To: arthur@ubu.UUCP (John Vaudin)
Organization: Computer Science, Warwick University, UK
Lines: 49

I would be grateful if anyone can help be on this one.

I posted a short while back saying I was having problems partitioning
my hard disk under MINIX. I have narrowed down the problem, and it appears
that MINIX cannot reliably access more than the first three or so mega
bytes of the disk. If I create three one megabyte partitions it works fine.
Also when I was running without partitions when I filled up the first three
megs I started to get disk errors, the fuller the disk the more the errors.
I have no problems when using MSDOS, so I think it must be a software
problem.

I assume it is some sort of incompatibility, between the real PC controller
and the one in my machine. Mine is a Xebec, I am not sure if it has a model
number, if it does I do not know it. If anyone can shed any light on this
problem I would be very grateful, as I don't have sufficient information
about the controller to fix this myself. What chipset does a real IBM XT use?

While I am at it I thought I'd mention a few more bugs:-

1) You can backspace over your prompt, I think this is a tty driver problem.

2) If the argument list to a program gets too long the shell complains
that it cannot excecute the program. I understand that exec is meant to return
some error status telling it that the arg list was too big. I guess this is
a kernel problem(?)

3) $# and $0 are set wrongly in shell scripts. $# is one too big, and $0 is
set to /bin/sh rather than the name of the shell script. A colleague of mine
has fixed this and I guess he will post the fix soon.

4) tar won't read from standard input using the -, and rm won't let you
remove things that start with a -. Probably missing features rather than bugs
really.

5) C programs must expicitly flush all buffers before exiting. I don't if
this a V7ism or if it is a bug as I don't have access to a V7 system.


I am sorry to keep reporting all these things, maybe I'll get round to
trying to fix some of them just as soon as I sort this hard disk out!


John.


UUCP: ..ukc!warwick!arthur          JANET: arthur@uk.ac.warwick.uu


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