wrp@biochsn.acc.Virginia.EDU (William R. Pearson) (07/05/89)
I am planning on purchasing a 300 Mbyte ESDI drive to replace 40 Mbyte and 30 Mbyte drives on my PC/AT (inboard 386). In my current configuration, I have the 40 Mbyte drive dedicated to Xenix, and the 30 Mbyte drive dedicated to DOS. With the 300 Mbyte drive, I would like to dedicate 200 Mbyte to Xenix, 100 Mbyte to DOS, and have both systems on the same drive. I am concerned that I will not be able to do this, because Xenix appears to only allow one DOS partition on a drive, and I am afraid that partition may be limited to 32 Mbyte. Has anyone put a large (100 Mbyte) DOS partition on the same drive as Xenix? Or put multiple 32 Mbyte partitions. If I cannot use a single drive for both Xenix and DOS as I wish, I may be better off getting 2 150 Mbyte drives. Bill Pearson
todd@stiatl.UUCP (Todd Merriman) (07/06/89)
In article <1710@hudson.acc.virginia.edu> wrp@biochsn.acc.Virginia.EDU (William R. Pearson) writes: >I am planning on purchasing a 300 Mbyte ESDI drive to replace >40 Mbyte and 30 Mbyte drives on my PC/AT (inboard 386). >I would like to dedicate 200 Mbyte to Xenix, 100 Mbyte to DOS, and have both >systems on the same drive. >I am concerned that I will not be able to do this.... Why not consider using an MSDOS emulator, such as VP/IX, and not have any MSDOS partitions. With this configuration, you have only one o/s to boot; and, the MSDOS and UNIX file systems can "see" each other. Backups and file sharing are much easier, and you can use the two o/s's simultaneously. VP/IX has some problems with "ill-behaved" programs, though. ...!gatech!stiatl!todd Todd Merriman * 404-377-TOFU * Atlanta, GA
davidsen@sungod.crd.ge.com (William Davidsen) (07/12/89)
In article <1710@hudson.acc.virginia.edu> wrp@biochsn.acc.Virginia.EDU (William R. Pearson) writes: | I am concerned that I will not be able to do this, because | Xenix appears to only allow one DOS partition on a drive, and I am | afraid that partition may be limited to 32 Mbyte. Has anyone put | a large (100 Mbyte) DOS partition on the same drive as Xenix? Or put | multiple 32 Mbyte partitions. If I cannot use a single drive for | both Xenix and DOS as I wish, I may be better off getting 2 150 Mbyte | drives. Xenix will allow about anything, but it only seems to use one partition per drive, and that must be as follows: 1. a "primary DOS partition" 2. size <= 32MB 3. starting at the beginning (cylinder 0) of the disk You can have other DOS partitions, but Xenix probably won't use them. You might want to have a small 5-10MB primary DOS partition and then a big one so you could use the primary as a buffer. Note: when running DOS partitions > 32MB you get a larger cluster size and every file takes up more space. If you don't have large files you may be happier with several small partitions. bill davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM) {uunet | philabs}!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me
chuckb@hounix.UUCP (Chuck Bentley) (07/16/89)
I have a 40 meg drive with rll which gives me 60 meg available. What I wanted to do was setup a small 20 meg partition for dos and the rest for XENIX. My primary purpose was to be able to transfer stuff back and forth on the hard disk. Unfortunatly my XENIX wouldn't allow me access to dos if it went past the 32 meg boundry. What I ended up doing was setting up the first 20 meg for XENIX, the next 10 meg for the boot partition of dos and the rest (30) meg for a second dos partition. It works fine, except that I don't need all that room for dos and would really rather give xenix another 20 meg. If anyone has a better way of setting this up I would dearly like to hear about it. Chuck...
edhew@xenitec.uucp (Ed Hew) (07/21/89)
In article <2092@hounix.UUCP> chuckb@hounix.UUCP (Chuck Bentley) writes: > >I have a 40 meg drive with rll which gives me 60 meg available. What I >wanted to do was setup a small 20 meg partition for dos and the rest for >XENIX. My primary purpose was to be able to transfer stuff back and >forth on the hard disk. Unfortunatly my XENIX wouldn't allow me access >to dos if it went past the 32 meg boundry. What I ended up doing was >setting up the first 20 meg for XENIX, the next 10 meg for the boot >partition of dos and the rest (30) meg for a second dos partition. It >works fine, except that I don't need all that room for dos and would >really rather give xenix another 20 meg. > >If anyone has a better way of setting this up I would dearly like to >hear about it. My release notes (SCO Xenix 2.3.1) suggest that some versions of DOS shouldn't be made larger than 32 megs as trying to exceed that (DOS) limit can corrupt the DOS ending cylinder. Also, remember the most versions of DOS know that no one has drives larger than 32 megs, so it's not possible to have partitions larger than 32 megs. [insert a _real_small_ smiley here]. My docs further suggest that you should always make the DOS partition *first* at the beginning of your disk, starting at cylinder 1 (not 0), due to where DOS likes to write it's boot block. You would then start your Xenix partition at the beginning of the next (after Dos partition) *cylinder* (not track) of your h/d. This helps prevent DOS from doing silly things like trying to overwrite your Xenix boot block by "overflowing" it's partition when full. You can presumably put other DOS partitions anywhere, because they don't contain any boot info (unverified). There are rumours that some of the newer DOS versions allow you to exceed the 32 meg limit, but I've been away from the wonderful world of DOS for a few years, so we'll have to leave it to others on the 'NET to comment on this. --ed {edhew@xenitec.uucp} {edhew@egvideo.uucp until new maps hit} > > Chuck... Ed. A. Hew Technical Trainer Xeni/Con Corporation work: edhew@xenicon.uucp -or- ..!{uunet!}utai!lsuc!xenicon!edhew > home: edhew@egvideo.uucp -or- ..!{uunet!}watmath!egvideo!edhew > home: changing to: edhew@xenitec.uucp [but be patient for new maps] # I haven't lost my mind, it's backed up on floppy around here somewhere!