bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante) (04/07/88)
In article <791@uvm-gen.UUCP> glade@uvm-gen.UUCP (Glade Bradford B.) writes:
-
- I have a 30Mb Mountain drive card running MS-DOS ver 3.2 on
- my AT&T 6300. I have noticed that the minimum file size
- is 8K bytes. So the cluster size is set at 8K. How can I
- reduce this. I have been told various things. Such as
[...]
- Also, I am curious if anyone has set up a MINIX partition
- on a Mountain drivecard and if any problems were encountered.
- I am considering the idea.
Funny you should ask :-) I'm involved in a group attempt to install minix on
some hard disks. No success just yet, but I've noticed a couple of things --
When we did a low-level format (on a 20Meg disk in a Z-286), it ended up with
a single default partition containing all 20 Meg in the 8K-cluster style.
Zenith's version of "fdisk", called "part", shows this as a DOS(16) partition.
(Oh, yeah -- we're using MSDOSv3.2, which knows about both cluster sizes.)
We have to delete this default partition in order to create the one(s) we
want. "Part" can only create DOS partitions, but the ones it creates are
labelled "DOS" (no 16 business), and they use 2k clusters. This DOS16 vs. DOS
cluster size is documented, but I don't have the documentation.
I wondered about all this when I first got a 30Meg (RLL) hd in my Z-158; I was
crushed to discover that although I'd spent big bucks to upgrade to v3.1, I had
the 8K clusters. Then I reformatted/repartitioned to get around some bad
sectors, and lo! I had 2K clusters. Now I understand.
As for minix: It requires non-DOS partitions. I am told that ATT's release of
MSDOS includes a partitioner that can create non-DOS partitions. Zenith's,
TI's, and that other company's (I'veBeenMauled?) don't, and the minix distrib-
ution includes a diskfix.asm program to cover this. We create three (DOS)
partitions that minix will use, run diskfix from within MSDOS to make all the
partitions non-DOS, then make a fourth partition which holds MSDOS -- about
5 Megs for that. Now if we could just boot from one of the minix partitions...
RAMontante, bobmon @ any of iuvax.cs.indiana.edu,
Computer Science (one of 'em ) silver.bacs.indiana.edu,
Indiana University (should be up) iucs.cs.indiana.edu
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