[comp.os.minix] MINIX on Olivetti M24 or ATT 6300

sch@oce.nl (Jakob Schripsema) (04/27/87)

>Moral of story: Minix and the AT&T PC6300's floppies are marginal!!!
>                You aint gonna build Minix on one of these machines.
>		At least, not on mine anyway...
>
>Any other 6300 owners had better luck?

The standard MINIX distribution doesn't run on the Olivetti M24 (=6300).
The problem with the floppy driver is quite simple : startup time is
750 milli seconds, not 250, for a write operation. reading does not
require a startup delay.

I also changed the winchester driver for the Olivetti harddisk controller.
It's not bug free, but works most of the time. Running a file system
check on a harddisk partition seams to leave the harddisk controller in
a strange state : initialization in wini.c doesn't work anymore.
I did not try this version on an reak IBM. I'm interested in the results.

After this posting I will post 2 shar files containing a lot of modified
files. Most important ones :

	1. floppy.c changed for Olivetti M24
	2. wini.c changed for Olivetti harddisk controller
	3. diskpart.c a program for harddisk partitioning, runs
	   under MINIX and DOS. I only tested this one for a
	   10Mb disk. Some harddisk parameters are hardcoded. It
	   should read the Disk Parameter block (sector 0) to
	   obtain its parameters.

Use the files you need and trow away the rest.

Succes

JaKob Schripsema, Oce-Nederland B.V.

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