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From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Big disks, big problems
Message-ID: <3442@ast.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 29 Sep 89 21:15:38 GMT
Sender: ast@cs.vu.nl
Reply-To: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
Lines: 25


John Nall recently brought up a problem that has been festering for ages:
disks larger than 32M.  I have a little 20M disk on my machine, so I can't
test this out, but I am very interested in hearing about people who have
tried to put MINIX on disks > 32M.  Please post rather than mailing, since
a lot of people have asked me about this problem.

In particular, since disk addresses are 16 bits, clearly no partition
larger than 64M can work, but how about > 32M?

  - Can the at_wini.c driver hack disks > 32M ?
  - Can fsck.c work (the MINIX version, not the standalone version)?
  - Does mkfs work > 32M?
  - Does fdisk work > 32M?
  - Does readall work > 32M?
  - Does checkdisk work > 32M?

What about disks that are larger than 64M, but have a MINIX partition
above 64M?  This probably implies longs somewhere, and I don't know if
they are used properly.

In short, I'd like to find out what happens when you use a big disk.


Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)