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From: ast@botter.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Hard disk problems
Message-ID: <1150@botter.cs.vu.nl>
Date: Thu, 23-Apr-87 08:10:44 EST
Article-I.D.: botter.1150
Posted: Thu Apr 23 08:10:44 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 25-Apr-87 06:46:01 EST
Reply-To: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Distribution: world
Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
Lines: 21


The person who wrote the hard disk drivers is going to take a look and see
if some of the problems can be fixed.  The new driver will be posted when
it is done.

Nevertheless, those drivers only handle two specific controllers, the DTC
for the AT and whatever the XT has.  Other controllers will continue to
be rejected.  What is probably needed is for someone to take one of the
two drivers, remove all the guts of it (the part that does the disk I/O),
leave the interface to the rest of the system, and write a tiny assembly
code routine to call the BIOS to do the disk I/O.  The performance will be
poor, since it will just wait, but for a lot of people with nonstandard
disks, this may be a good way to get bootstrapped.

I have already been publicly excoriated for my ignorance of MS-DOS.  It is
true and, worse yet, I am not even ashamed.  I don't know much more about
the BIOS.  Do we have a volunteer to carry out the above project?  It 
probably isn't much work for someone who knows the BIOS well and has studied
either driver for an evening.  

Andy Tanenbaum