nick@nswitgould.OZ (Nick Andrew) (04/17/88)
I'm posting this for a friend whose hard disk/controller won't co-operate with the winchester driver. He has tried both the 1.2 xt_wini (the version posted by Andy after the 1.2 diffs) and the 1.1 driver. The hardware is : DSS (hong kong) XT clone, HC-100 C2 hard disk controller (supposedly fully IBM compatible), and Seagate ST-125 20 mb drive (4 heads, 615 cylinders). The errors are "Unrecoverable disk error on Drive ..." Also I'm told the drive access light STAYS ON after the error appears! Can anybody help by mailing a diff to the 1.2 driver, or even a hint as to what is happening would be helpful. Thanks ... Nick. ACSnet: nick@nswitgould.oz UUCP: ...!uunet!munnari!nswitgould.oz!nick
msh@otc.oz (Michael Homsey) (04/20/88)
In article <8546@nswitgould.OZ> nick@nswitgould.OZ (Nick Andrew) writes: > > The hardware is : DSS (hong kong) XT clone, HC-100 C2 hard disk >controller (supposedly fully IBM compatible), and Seagate ST-125 20 mb ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >drive (4 heads, 615 cylinders). This does not mean that Minix will run. All this implies is that when you put the disk subsytem into the PC it will be useable. Not all disk drives are similiar to the generic ibm 10Mb disk. (cf compatible) The way the bios works is as follows: It sets up information in ram re devices. It then scans memory in 2k chunks looking for a signature word to identify eproms on boards that may be plugged into the pc-bus. If it finds one, it picks up the address that follows and jumps to it. Well what has this to do with Minix. A lot. This is the mechanism that MANY hard disk card manufacturers have used to add there disk to the system. They have a different hardware interface and hide this from msdos by having the necessary bios routines on the card and overlaying the main bios's tables. So, when you try to use these with Minix it dont work. -- Michael Homsey msh@otc.oz OTC, Systems Development {uunet,mcvax}!otc.oz!msh Box 7000 Sydney NSW 2001 Voice: +61 2 287 4148 Australia Fax: +61 2 287 4990