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From: Leisner.Henr@xerox.com (marty)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Bug reading block special devices (problem solved?)
Message-ID: <586@louie.udel.EDU>
Date: Tue, 13-Oct-87 17:06:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: louie.586
Posted: Tue Oct 13 17:06:42 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 15-Oct-87 03:07:49 EDT
Sender: mmdf@udel.EDU
Lines: 26

Andy,

I agree with you about floppy disks -- but what about hard disks
partitions?

This become a problem when I tried to run mkfs on a hard disk partition,
the initial write on the end of the file system worked, then the read
failed (never getting into the device driver).

The reason for the change was mkfs was able to make a file system the
size of the hard disk partition.  It seemed like a catch22 situation --
mkfs can't make the file system because it can't read the end of it, and
it can't read the end of it until it makes the file system.

Is there a way to find out the size of hard disk partitions which the
file can access?  I don't see any except doing a read and seeing if it
fails.

I suppose mkfs could be modified to only abort on write errors (which
the driver will pass back).

marty
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