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From: louie@sayshell.umd.edu (Louis A. Mamakos)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Help w/Disked for hard disks
Message-ID: <1413@umd5>
Date: Sat, 10-Jan-87 11:24:56 EST
Article-I.D.: umd5.1413
Posted: Sat Jan 10 11:24:56 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 10-Jan-87 23:53:48 EST
References: <159@wlbreng1.UUCP> <11186@sun.uucp>
Sender: nobody@umd5
Reply-To: louie@sayshell.umd.edu (Louis A. Mamakos)
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park
Lines: 33

I've been hacking around with Disk Device drivers lateley, so...

In article <11186@sun.uucp> cmcmanis@sun.uucp (Chuck McManis) writes:
>In article <159@wlbreng1.UUCP>, steve@wlbreng1.UUCP (Steve Childress) writes:
>> I have a question or two:
>> 1. DISKED doesn't like the drive name "HD0:" which is what I chose
>>     to put in mountlist.  Do I have to have a "resource" of that name?
>>     I find no discussion of this in the RKM.

I created a disk drive called "DS0:", and DiskED seemed to work just fine on
it.

>> 4. To partition a hard  disk, you merely make two entries in /devs/mountlist
>>    and issue two mount commands in your startup file. (this question arose
>>    in other discussions here.)
>> 		Steve Childress
>
>This is indeed what is required, however the driver has to know that you
>will be partitioning it and thus add the Offset it finds in the DISKENV
>array to the blocknumber passed.

This is incorrect.  The file system driver passes the absolute block number on
the disk to the disk device driver.  In the MountList file (or when using
AddDosNode()), you specifiy the starting track number for the disk.  Thus, the
disk driver can be completely ignorant of disk partitions.  

I claim, however, that the partition information should be ON the disk.  The
disk device driver can read it at initialization time and create the logical
disks at that time, rather than doing a Mount command.  What if I pick up my
SCSI disk drive and carry it to my friend's machine?  I'd sure like it to
work there too without hacking up any files.  
Louis A. Mamakos  WA3YMH    Internet: louie@TRANTOR.UMD.EDU
University of Maryland, Computer Science Center - Systems Programming