Date   : Fri, 14 Sep 2007 01:57:02 +0100
From   : jgh@... (Jonathan Graham Harston)
Subject: IDE Interface and Level 3

>Message-ID: <46E7CBCB.3030902@...>
 
Chris Priest <chris.priest@...> wrote:
> Thats what I thought, but damned if I could make WFSInit work with the
> drive if it had data on it.
 
That's odd, it works here.
 
> 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
 
I left mine forty minutes to boot up :)
 
> due to the size of the partition at 258mb!
 
I can only think that it scans the drive for something. It does start up
and report an absurdly small amount of free memory once it has booted up.
Mine says "0B objects"
 
> So I thought, OK, I'll modify the hdinit code to create 64mb partitions
 
You don't need to modify any code. Just press 'Z' to specify the
drive size.
 
> 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.
 
ADFS doesn't partition drives. Logical drive 1 starts at exactly
512*1024*1024 bytes into the drive. The IDE sector address is the entire
ADFS sector address, which includes the drive number in bit 21.
 
> Could this be because the drive is bigger than 256mb?  256/2 = 128 (8
> bit) /2 = 64mb ?
 
No. It's 'cos they aren't partitions. They are hardwired at 512M - the
maximum the ADFS API will access. If you wish you could modify the IDE
patch to pass the ADFS sector address to the IDE device with the 'drive'
bit moved down to chop a drive into smaller pieces.
 
-- 
J.G.Harston - jgh@...                - mdfs.net/User/JGH
Youth has now fled. Their best years have been passed in the service
of the party. They are ageing and their ideals have also passed,
dispersed by the contrarities of daily struggles.