ast@botter.UUCP (04/23/87)
On some of the AT&T 6300s, Olivetti has chosen a diskette drive with a very long motor startup time. When MINIX starts up a diskette drive it waits 250 msec for the drive to get up to speed, and then just starts reading or writing. If the drive is not up to speed, you get errors, usually undetected. The fix is to change the elements of the array mtr_setup to 3*HZ/4 or maybe even HZ (750 msec or 1 sec, respectively) in floppy.c When making this fix, look at the code not at the book. This whole area was changed between the time the book got printed and the disks got printed (?). This problem does not occur on real IBMs and most other clones because everyone else used drives with the standard startup time. Will people having problems with 6300 diskettes please try this fix and report back to the network. Andy Tanenbaum