rickf@pnet02.gryphon.com (Rick Flower) (11/12/89)
Well, I just borrowed a large Maxtor drive from a friend and was in the
process of formatting it and before it would finish, it would crash the entire
system -- not to the GURU level though.. My MountList is below for those that
are wondering.. Anyway, I was told that there is a POSSIBLE bug in AmigaDos
that won't let you have a SINGLE volume that is greater than around 100Meg's
or so... Perhaps that is why the thing wouldn't format the entire drive as a
single partition???? I tried doing the format 3 times and every time, boom! I
don't know if it had an error message, 'cause I was running Dmouse in the
background and when I check on the 'puter a few hours later, Dmouse had the
screen and that was when it hung! Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone
could tell me if this possible "bug" is of any consequence or not?!?!
DH2: Device = hddisk.device
FileSystem = L:FastFileSystem
Priority = 10
Unit = 3
Flags = 0
Surfaces = 15
BlocksPerTrack = 32
Reserved = 1
PreAlloc =0
Interleave = 0
LowCyl = 1
HighCyl = 1223
StackSize = 4000
Buffers = 30
BufMemType = 0
Mount = 1
GlobVec = 1
DosType = 0x444F5301
#
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+=============================================================================+greg@noel.CTS.COM (J. Gregory Noel) (11/15/89)
Rick Flower (rickf@pnet02.gryphon.com) writes: >Well, I just borrowed a large Maxtor drive from a friend and was in the >process of formatting it and before it would finish, it would crash the entire >system -- not to the GURU level though.. I had this same problem with a Maxtor "1224" cylinder disk I got via Newbury Data. I ended up having to call the factory about it. It turns out that the last two cylinders are reserved for use by the controller for spare tracks, control information, and so forth, so that you can only use 1222 cylinders. I also had some problems with making a FFS partition the only one on the disk (WB 1.2; this may have been fixed); it kept turning into an OFS partition. I ended up lying about how the disk was laid out by claiming there were only five heads per cylinder and made an OFS partition on the bottom two-thirds of the first cylinder. It worked for me; your mileage may vary. > Surfaces = 15 I used 5 > LowCyl = 1 I used 3 > HighCyl = 1223 I used 3665 (1221*3 + 2) The OFS partition then runs from "cylinder" one to "cylinder" two. Also, you might want to check the documentation very carefully about this one: > BlocksPerTrack = 32 My documentation gave the "blocks per track" and "accessible blocks per track" differently -- there's one block per track reserved for bad-block recovery. I almost didn't find this out..... (Unfortunatly, the disk and the documentation are now about 1400 miles away, so I can't look to see whether there are 33 or 32 real blocks per track (32 or 31 available, respectively).) One other thing: Has anybody ever looked into a hddisk.device that does track- level I/O, similar to the floppy drive? My calculations say that if there were such a thing, you could get over forty sectors per track, or about 25% more on the disk. This seems like such a significant improvment that I must be missing something; I can't believe that I'm the only one that would have noticed this. The only reason I can think of is that there are really so many bad sectors normally smoothed out by the extra sector per track that would be bad tracks in this scheme that they would swamp the bad-track overflow area. Anybody know for sure? -- J. Gregory Noel, UNIX Guru greg@noel.cts.com or greg@noel.uucp
mlelstv@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de (Michael van Elst ) (11/20/89)
rickf@pnet02.gryphon.com (Rick Flower) writes: >Well, I just borrowed a large Maxtor drive from a friend and was in the >process of formatting it and before it would finish, it would crash the entire >system -- not to the GURU level though.. My MountList is below for those that >are wondering.. Anyway, I was told that there is a POSSIBLE bug in AmigaDos >that won't let you have a SINGLE volume that is greater than around 100Meg's >or so... There is a bug in the old filesystem that limits partition sizes to 52MBytes and a bug in FastFileSystem (fixed in WB1.3.2) that limits partition size to nearly 300MBytes. Now limits should be at the maximum (32bit) block number, i.e. 4 Gigabytes. Michael van Elst E-mail: UUCP: ...uunet!unido!fauern!immd4!mlelstv