[comp.os.minix] MINIX HARD DISK DRIVER FOR QUBIE & WD CTRL

steve_karra@f600.n713.fido.oz (Steve Karra) (11/22/89)

Original to: all
Anyone who has had experience with getting the WINI.C driver
(PC Version) to work with a Western Digital Controller and
Qubie hard disk - please let me know.
Presently the disk appears to be full of errors with the
standard driver that comes with MINIX 1.1.  The second
partition has been marked as NON-DOS (XENIX) and sometimes
the mkfs /dev/hd2 2074 works without error but then when I
use it errors appear all over the place.
Thanks for any help.
p.s. I am using the PC (not AT) WINI driver which I had to
compile and build into the new kernel.

--- TMail v1.12e
 * Origin: Prophet TBBS - First TBBS in Australia (3:713/600)

jaeger@madnix.UUCP (Jay Jaeger) (12/02/89)

In article <16662@ultima.cs.uts.oz> steve_karra@f600.n713.fido.oz (Steve Karra) writes:
>Anyone who has had experience with getting the WINI.C driver
>(PC Version) to work with a Western Digital Controller and
>Qubie hard disk - please let me know.
>Presently the disk appears to be full of errors with the
>standard driver that comes with MINIX 1.1.  The second
>partition has been marked as NON-DOS (XENIX) and sometimes
>the mkfs /dev/hd2 2074 works without error but then when I
>use it errors appear all over the place.
>Thanks for any help.

I used to have just such a configuration (currently a friend has it).
I don't think your problem is the controller and disk, since the Qubie/
WD combination (at least the one I had) has the same sector / platter
geometry as the original IBM PC/XT 10MB disk (although it has more
cylinders).  That makes the MINIX driver happy.  HOWEVER, I did have
to fiddle a bit.  Things I recall being important:

1)  I had to build the partitions with /dev/hd0.

2)  I only got it to work with MINIX as the FIRST partition (but
    makred NON-DOS and NON-BOOTABLE.

3)  Then I used DOS to build it's partition AFTER the MINIX one.

It has been several months, and things are a little fuzzy, but if you
play with it enough, you probably can get it to work.  One thing I
vaguely recall was the DOS would not even TOUCH a NON-DOS partition -
not delete it, not turn it DOS, not nothin', so you have to build the
MINIX partition with MINIX.  I also vaguely recall that MINIX could 
not deal with being other than the first partition, but maybe I just
did something wrong or wasn't careful enough...