jim@turbo.RAY.COM (Jim Shaw x8232) (01/28/88)
Two things I would like to hear comments/ideas on. 1) I have installed an 80 track drive in my XT clone and have added the entries to the floppy driver table to support 800K per disk.i.e the disks are formatted with 10 sectors per track. The problem is that the driver doesn't get an error if it is trying to access only sectors 1 thru 9 so doesn't select the correct table entry. Also when it does get an error it didn't recalculate the cylinder/sector/head numbers which are now incorrect. I now have made it recalculate these if the table index is altered after an error but it doesn't solve the first problem. I am considering making mkfs write the disk type into an entry in the superblock. This would be sent to the floppy driver during a mount. This would solve the problem. 2) I have added formatting support to the floppy driver by adding a 3rd message type DISK_FORMAT and am presently figuring out how to interface to it through the FS. I think another system call is necessary as there is no other way to access the driver. I am tenatively adding system call #69 handled by the FS which passes the message on to FLOPPY. A system call format(track,type,buffer) will then format a single track on a "type" disk with data from buffer Error handling and verifying would be handled by the a utility program which would also exec mkfs to set up a new file system on the newly formatted floppy. Any comments etc especially with regard to the system level interface would be appreciated. -- ------------------------------------------------- # Jim Shaw # # (617)-460-8232 # ------------------------------------------------- jim@turbo.ray.com .....!rayssd!turbo!jim