Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!stat!vsserv!loligo.cc.fsu.edu!nall From: nall@loligo.cc.fsu.edu (John Nall) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: Large Disks Message-ID: <241@vsserv.scri.fsu.edu> Date: 3 Oct 89 23:43:45 GMT Sender: news@vsserv.scri.fsu.edu Reply-To: nall@loligo.cc.fsu.edu (John Nall) Organization: Florida State University Lines: 35 In a previous message, I complained about the inability of Minix to use partitions greater than 32 MB. In response, Andy posed a general question as to what problems might exist regarding this. This is kind of an "alpha version" of tentative results of an investigation (that is, take it with a grain of salt, but it might be useful....I'll report in greater detail later). Fdisk seems to have no problem making a partition greater than 32 MB. Be aware that you should give it a parameter as to how many heads your disk has! Otherwise, he makes the assumption that it only has four! So use "fdisk -5" (or whatever). Mkfs has a couple of easily solved problems. There is a variable called "blocks" which is declared as int. It should be unsigned int. There is also a variable called "nrblocks" which has the same problem. There is also a #define statement which declares N_BLOCKS to be 32000. I set this to 65528 (as it specifies that it has to be divisible by 8, and 65536 would be a little big, I would think). After this, mkfs /dev/hd5 40000 worked OK. Prior to that, it would work for 32767 but blew up on 32768 (and greater). This also implies that at_wini works OK, since it writes the last block! After I check further, I'll post patches. ====================================================================== John Nall Internet: nall@nu.cs.fsu.edu Computer Science Department Florida State University "Today, a Moon Moth -- tomorrow, a Sea Dragon Conquerer!!"