bing@galbp.LBP.HARRIS.COM (Bing Bang) (07/30/87)
I am having some problems with my newly purchased 286 XT mother board. Everything works great under DOS (yuk!) but MINIX refuses to access the hard disk now! I only changed the mother board, the controllers are all the same ones I've been using. First I thought the faster speed of the 286 was exhausting the retry count, so I made them much bigger, with no change... MINIX still can't read the hard disk. Any help would be appreciated. -- Bing H. Bang +-------------------+ Harris/Lanier |MSDOS: just say no.| Atlanta GA +-------------------+
hgm@beta.UUCP (Harry McGavran) (08/01/87)
I am using a "Bullet" 286 XT, and I posted some diffs that were included in the xt_wini.c that AST recently posted as the 1.2 version for the XT disk driver. Some of those diffs had to do with getting the disk driver to work with the "Bullet" and a Western Digital Style (Basic Time) Controller. The same changes allowed my system at home (a regular IBM PC with an ordinary Western Digital Controller) to function properly. The change pertinent to the "Bullet" was in fact increasing the retry count. I had increased it to 32000 (already in the 1.2 version) and that worked fine until I built a system with Microsoft C version 4.0. Then I had to further increase the count to 0xfff0 but that requires the variables associated with the retry count be changed to unsigned ints. (from signed ints or shorts) These changes did NOT get included in the 1.2 version of xt_wini.c that AST recently posted. They are easy to do though, just look for all occurrences of the retry count and change the associated variable types. Then change the definition of the maximum retry count to 0xfff0. I haven't had any troubles since with the "Bullet" 286 XT. Hope this is of some help for you or others with the "Bullet" 286 XT. Harry McGavran Los Alamos National Laboratory Group C-8, MS-B294 Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545 ARPANET: hgm@lanl.GOV USENET: ihnp4!lanl!hgm