Date : Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:53:23 +0100
From : bbcmailinglist@... (Ian Wolstenholme)
Subject: Small help needed with initialising a L3 hard drive
The DIM space error, as others have said, is because the card geometry
has too many cylinders for the array required to fit in the Beeb's RAM.
You can get round this two ways. The first is to use a second processor with
enough RAM (a 6502 cheese wedge might work, an ARM7 co-processor
will definitely work).
The problem then with this solution is that it is unlikely that the disc maps
will fit into RAM when the L3 server tries to mount them, so you won't
really have solved anything.
I'm waiting for !65Tube to be made to run on the ARM7 co-pro to see if
this helps!
The second solution is to "fake" the drive geometry parameters by
manually editing WFSINIT to reduce the number of cylinders to a manageable
amount and increase the number of heads and sectors per cylinder to
give roughly the same disc size.
This works, and it is possible to have 4 512MB hard discs mounted by the
L3 server (and 4 floppies as well if required) by doing this.
However, I have encountered quite a few FS Error 53 messages coming
up when using the Level 3 File Server. The first of my four partitions
(actually now a 256MB ADFS bit and a 256MB Econet L3 bit) is more
or less corrupt now due to these errors; there are a lot of files I can't
use. I'm not sure whether this has happened due to manually setting
the drive geometry parameters which has confused the L3 server, or
whether I've just been unlucky with some other fault occurring. I'd
certainly test the disc for a good while before putting any valuable data
on it which isn't stored anywhere else.
Best wishes,
Ian
----- Original Message -----
From: Andy Ford [mailto:acorn@...]
To: bbc-micro@...
Sent: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:59:41 +0100
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.
_______________________________________________
bbc-micro mailing list
bbc-micro@...
http://lists.cloud9.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/bbc-micro