mdavis@seismo.css.gov@pro-sol.UUCP (Morgan Davis) (01/13/87)
Those of you who have Sider-like (Xebec) hard disks with installation
utilities in DOS 3.3, one being INSTALL PT#4, should note that you can
indeed partition your drive for as few as two operating systems if you
want. By using INSTALL PT#4 (press "R" while running it and a built-in
menu will pop up), you can configure the drive on your own, setting your
own partition sizes, and selecting only the DOS's that you want. Note,
however, that DOS 3.3 must always be on the drive (unfortunately), as it
required for the boot code to work.
Since I mainly use ProDOS, I wanted to configure my hard disk for as much
space for ProDOS as possible. My typical 10mb drive was formatted with the
following information:
# Cylinders 306
# Heads 4
Reduced Write Cyl. 306
Pre Comp. Cyl. 306
Control-Byte 7
# Alternate Tracks 12
Interleave 16
DOS 3.3 --> Starting Track is 0, 1 small volume
ProDOS --> Volume 1 Starting Track is 49
Volume 2 Starting Track is 637
This gives 9400 blocks in ProDOS per volume, so 18,800 total. Miscellaneous
information:
1 track on the 10mb drive is worth 8k (16 512-byte blocks)
1 10mb drive consists of 1,224 tracks total
Without any real technical information, I was able to derive the above
by mainly trial and error after backing up my entire drive, and then playing
around with INSTALL PT#4. It took two attempts to get the starting track
numbers correct before I had it fitted perfectly for a small section of DOS
and the rest of it for ProDOS. I would assume that you could substitute
something like Pascal or CP/M for ProDOS using the same values as I did in
order to get two equal volumes, but I wouldn't mess with them -- ProDOS isn't
so goofy when it comes to fitting it for any kind of mass-storage device.
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DISCLAIMER: IF YOU EVEN MESS WITH INSTALL PT#4, AND YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU
ARE DOING, YOU CAN REALLY THRASH YOUR DRIVE AND GET INTO ALL SORTS OF TROUBLE.
YOU ASSUME ALL RESPONSIBILITY FOR LOST DATA (OR WORSE) IF YOU ATTEMPT ANY
OF THE ABOVE MENTIONED PROCEDURES -- I AM NOT LIABLE.
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--Morgan Davis
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