Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!star.cs.vu.nl!ast@cs.vu.nl 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)