m692040@sdsu.UUCP (deborah mullen) (05/19/87)
I have an ARC Turbo Xt colone with a Xebec hard disk controller. Minix can up ok except for the hard disk (10mb). I could only use the first partition and even then occasionally got disk errors. I used the fixes that Gary Oliver and Harry McGavran posted for wini.c For my system, the disk table pointers (type_0 and type_1) are NOT reversed as Harry McGavran suggests. I located a new bug. On line 614 of the original listing: copy_prt( i * 5); should be: copy_prt( i); The parameter expected by copy_prt() is the drive number ( 0 or 1). Copy_prt copies the partition table into an array of structures. If for some reason (could happen with clones), the variable, nr_drives, gets set with a 1 instead of a 0, then copy_prt() will fail. I have no problems with the hard disk now ( Minix is on last partition). Contrary to other postings, I have no problem with fsck on HD.
bing@galbp.UUCP (Bing Bang) (05/26/87)
I have another bug fix for hard disks. I own a Micro-1 turbo XT with a unknown made-in-the-orient controller and a 20mb hard disk. I was getting so many disk errors before this fix that I could hardly do a mkfs without getting into serious trouble. The same symptoms showed up on all the Wyse PCs at my office which uses a Adaptec controller. The problem was fixed in the routine com_out in the file xt_wini.c by holding the interrupts turned off untill after the status port has been read, right after the 6 command bytes are output to the controller. This fixed all the problems for my Micro-1 as well as the Wyses at work. Might want to give this a try if you have hd problems. I posted this article sometime ago, but because of our news engine having difficulties, I doubt it made it out of our site. Bing H Bang Harris/Lanier Atlanta GA MSDOS: An example of what an OS should not be like.