chm@ut-emx.UUCP (Christopher H. Marshall) (07/26/89)
I would like to hear from anyone who has gotten a floppy-sized hard disk partition to work, especially with the Microbotics Stardrive. I tried to Mount such a partition on my StarDrive but always got guru #3. Never made it to the formatting stage. Any suggestions or information would be appreciated. E-mail, please. Thanks, Christopher Marshall chm@emx.utexas.edu cmft552@hermes.chpc.utexas.edu
saul@comspec.UUCP (saul juliao) (07/27/89)
In article <15745@ut-emx.UUCP> chm@ut-emx.UUCP (Christopher H. Marshall) writes: >I would like to hear from anyone who has gotten a floppy-sized hard >disk partition to work, especially with the Microbotics Stardrive. > >I tried to Mount such a partition on my StarDrive but always got guru >#3. Never made it to the formatting stage. > >Any suggestions or information would be appreciated. E-mail, please. > > Thanks, > Christopher Marshall > chm@emx.utexas.edu > cmft552@hermes.chpc.utexas.edu Hi, I've been able to partition my hard drive with disk sized partitions. I'm using a Comspec SCSI adapter so it doesn't normally use mountlist but it should be straight forward to setup on any system. First you must find out how many blocks are available to the user, this is easily done by asking the hard drive with a SCSI READ CAPACITY command which returns this number. Then you must use this number and come up with three integers that equal to the read capacity or lower. The first number is 2 (there are 2 heads on a floppy), so we have two surfaces to work with. The second number is 11 (floppies have 11 blks/trk), and the third number is the left over Integer for the number of cylinders. firstnumber * secondnumber * thirdnumber <= READ CAPACITY 2 * 11 * ##### <= ######## Remember that SCSI drive are used logically and not physically unlike ST506 drives, so for the drive to work properly these numbers can be anything if you use the formula stated above. For your floppy partitions your cylinder number should be 80, and you none floppy partitions are what ever. The whole drive should be setup as 2 heads, 11 blks/trk. On my system it is all handled through a SCSI preferences provided with my SCSI controller, you might have some equivalent on you system. If not please email me with the type of drive you have I might be able to help with a possible READ CAPACITY number. Note: the more partitions you have the more chip/fast memory is taken up by the system. sorry for the long explanation ... If you have any further question please don'y hesitate to email or call. -- Saul A. Juliao | uucp: saul@becker.UUCP Comspec Communications | or ...!uunet!mnetor!becker!saul 74 Wingold Avenue, |------------------------------------------------ Toronto, Ontario, Canada | Sysop of Toronto's AMIGA Developer BBS (TARDIS) (416) 785-3553 Ext. 365 |------------------------------------------------ Home: (416) 279-3698 | Just another Amiga creature ... -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Any above comments should not be taken as Comspec's nor there opinions.
jdow@gryphon.COM (J. Dow) (07/30/89)
In article <15745@ut-emx.UUCP> chm@ut-emx.UUCP (Christopher H. Marshall) writes: >I would like to hear from anyone who has gotten a floppy-sized hard >disk partition to work, especially with the Microbotics Stardrive. > >I tried to Mount such a partition on my StarDrive but always got guru >#3. Never made it to the formatting stage. > >Any suggestions or information would be appreciated. E-mail, please. > > Thanks, > Christopher Marshall > chm@emx.utexas.edu > cmft552@hermes.chpc.utexas.edu This is quite easy Christopher if youkeep used disk blocks straight in the mountlist. Remember that StarDrive, and indeed ALL trackdisk interfaces, think in terms of offsets and byte counts. So when you setup your df4: partition on the HD you must tell it to offset properly into the disk so that you do not run afoul of any other partitions. If you have a HD that thinks in terms of 15 heads, 35 sectors per track, and 1218 available cylinders and want to start things after your sys: partition which is setup with Surfaces = 15, Blockspertrack = 35, and hicyl = 70 you have to figure out that this means it uses disk blocks out to number 37275 or so. Then you define your df4: partition. It should be set up such that its first physical disk block begins at or beyond 37275. You cannot say locyl = 71. If you do it'll think it should begin placing things on the disk at block 71*11*2 = 1562 which will corrupt things in the sys: partition leading to a visit to the man in the loin cloth who lives on the mountain top. You'd have to tell it that lowcyl = 1695 or so. Now whether or not this is useable is a different ball of hydrocarbons. DiskCopy is too smart for its own good in regards to floppies and may not like to do a diskcopy into that partition. And there is no help in sight as you will have to start lowcyl at 1 for any partition in the near future if you want to upgrade to a newer StarDrive device driver that will automount if not autoboot. (I *might* even get a rad: like autoreboot in there but don't know for sure. If I do I am quite sure that VirusX'd dislike it and complain about it.) I hope this little disertation helps a bit. Thisis something I have never found the need to do to myself. (I built a version of my ramdisk driver that could recover itself and looked like a floppy disk enough that diskcopy was happy. And with four drives I understand Charlie Heath was able to run four diskcopy's at once. I should spruce it up a little and post it someday. (Prolly onBIX...)) {@_@} -- Sometimes a bird in the hand leaves a sticky deposit. Perhaps it were best it remain there in the bush with the other one. {@_@} jdow on bix (where else?) Sometimes the dragon wins. Sometimes jdow@gryphon.CTS.COM the knight. Does the fair maiden ever {backbone}!gryphon!jdow win? Surely both the knight and dragon stink. Maybe the maiden should suicide? Better yet - she should get an Amiga and quit playing with dragons and knights.