Date : Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:15:19 +0100
From : mfirth@... (Michael Firth)
Subject: Small help needed with initialising a L3 hard drive
I think the best recent advice on this is here:
http://mdfs.net/Archive/BBCMicro/2009/04/30/002126.htm
Basically, the reason the WFSINIT is crashing with a DIM error is because
there are too many cylinders on the disk.
Ian's solution was to hard code a geometry that was a similar total size to
the
real one, but with more heads/sectors and less cylinders.
I did have a plan to try and make this automatic - if the number of
cylinders is
over 5000, half it and double one of the other parameters - repeat until the
cylinder size is in spec.
I haven't got around to implementing this though.
Not sure what the issue is with the 64Mb CF card, but I think I had at least
one
card that wouldn't work - I just tried another one.
In un-Beeb related stuff I've found that a few types of compact flash cards
won't
work right in a few applications.
I must try and get a machine set up as an L3 server now I have the ReCo6502
to
let it run. Not sure there's much real point when I have a working L4
server, but
it would prove that I can do it :-)
Hope this helps
Michael
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andy Ford" <acorn@...>
To: <bbc-micro@...>
Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2009 8:59 PM
Subject: [BBC-Micro] Small help needed with initialising a L3 hard drive
> Good evening. :)
>
> I know this has been discussed a few times, I did a search and read the
> threads I found but I am still struggling a little bit with this, its
> starting to drive me crazy as its such a simple thing too. :)
>
> I am unable to initialise a disk for Level 3, I am currently using the
> latest version of WFSINIT from JGH's site (the one that reads the disk
> size so ideal for IDE interfaces if it cannot read the disk geometry) ,
> I have tried other versions of this but the latest one seems to be the
> best one.
>
> However, I do not seem to be able to get this to work properly.
>
> I have tried two (physical) drives, one is 4.3Gb and the other just over
> 1Gb. Now, there is no problem whatsoever with formatting these via
> HDINIT and using them as normal drives. The same with my CF card (which
> is a 1Gb card so 512 or so formatted) , I can happily use this for ADFS
> as well without any issue.
>
> My problem is despite trying everything, WFSINIT will fail with the
> usual Dim Space error at line 350 :(
>
> No problem I thought. I would simply cheat and obtained a small (64Mb)
> flash card. I formatted this and it gave me about 31Mb, which is plenty.
> The problem with this (note: this same problem happens with both HDINIT
> and WFSINIT) , it cannot read the size for some reason...
>
> What happens with HDINIT is this: If I investigate the drive, it finds
> the correct size and I can format it, no problem there. Now, if I
> attempt to scan for size, it counts to 32768 and then locks the machine
> up (caps lock etc has no effect, I have to Break out of it)
>
> The WFSINIT routine locks at the same point too, I am wondering what's
> the best option really at this point, I assume the modifications to
> WFSINIT are simply the change of code to allow it to find the size
> instead of geometry (as per Scan For Size in HDINIT)
>
> As a quick note: I do my usual preparation first (copy the FS code to
> the hard drive and reserve about 1Mb with some temporary files, compact
> it and then hard reboot before going any further)
>
> Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated as usual :)
>
>
> Andy.
>
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