Date   : Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:21:47 +0100
From   : chris.priest@... (Chris Priest)
Subject: IDE Interface and Level 3

Thats what I thought, but damned if I could make WFSInit work with the 
drive if it had data on it.

On a side note, I partitioned the drive as an empty drive using WFSInit, 
540mb connor drive, 258mb usuable with 8bit interface, you were correct 
in that it takes an age to initialise the drive, but it takes even 
longer to boot the fileserver using it :)  Not sure why, but I left it 
for 25mins and it still had not come back as ready.  I assume this was 
due to the size of the partition at 258mb!

So I thought, OK, I'll modify the hdinit code to create 64mb partitions 
as opposed to assigning all 258mb to drive 0, while this worked for 
drive 0, it correctly created a partition at 64mb, partitioning drive 1 
didn't work using my modified code, it wrote sector 0, but hung up when 
attempting to write sector 1.

I modified max% to be 40000 as opposed to 200000 in PROCFormat, line 
1180, also changed the PROCInfo at line 710 to read 
PROCInfo(hd%,14,&40000,"ADFS") Although as I understand it, this just 
reports back the partition size and does not have any effect on the 
actual formatting.

The program correctly reported back Drive 0 64mb allocation and Drive 1 
64mb allocation.

Not sure if that is the correct way to go about it, but it seemed to 
work, at least it did for drive 0, but not for drive 1 :(

Could this be because the drive is bigger than 256mb?  256/2 = 128 (8 
bit) /2 = 64mb ?

Appreciate any thoughts on this!


Jonathan Graham Harston wrote:
>> Message-ID: <46E50888.1080308@...>
>>     
>  
> Chris Priest <chris.priest@...> wrote:
>   
>> So, If you are saying that the modified WFSInit requires a completely
>> blank ADFS drive,
>>     
>  
> No, not a blank drive, a drive that hasn't had WFSInit applied to
> it. Anyway, I've added the required code to actually examine the
> drive to discover the physical size if the 'read physical size'
> call does not respond. It's a bit fiddly editing compressed code :)
>  
> WFSInit uses the free space at the end of the ADFS file structure
> to store the network disk structure. To stop ADFS overwriting it
> the removes that space from the ADFS free space map and reduces
> the 'disk size' setting in ADFS's free space map.
>  
> So, if you have 200K of data on a 30M drive and do *FREE you will
> get 200K used, 29.8M free. After using WFSInit you will get 200K
> used, 32K free. The 29.8M has vanished from what ADFS can see.
>  
> A bonus of the patch to WFSInit is that it correctly initialises a
> floppy as a fileserver disk, as floppies don't have any way of
> responding to a "physical disk size" query, but they have a
> logical disk size in the free space map.
>  
>   
>>          I would not be able to have an ADFS partition on the
>> drive and boot the L3 fileserver software from the Hard Disc?
>> I would still have to continue booting from the floppy?
>>     
>  
> You should be able to boot from the hard drive. Copy the relevant
> programs (eg !Boot, FS code, StartFS, whatever) to the hard drive
> /before/ using WFSInit
>  
>