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Received: by minnie.vk1xwt.ampr.org with NNTP id AA1135 ; Tue, 23 Feb 93 14:27:36 EST Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!uunet!ferkel.ucsb.edu!taco!gatech!darwin.sura.net!bogus.sura.net!howland.reston.ans.net!usc!cs.utexas.edu!qt.cs.utexas.edu!yale.edu!ira.uka.de!math.fu-berlin.de!uniol!unidui!du9ds4!prang From: prang@du9ds4.fb9dv.uni-duisburg.de (Juergen Prang) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: IDE Drive Translation Date: 10 Feb 93 09:19:32 GMT Organization: Universitaet Duisburg GH Lines: 63 Message-ID: <prang.729335972@du9ds4> References: <prang.729039913@du9ds4> <1993Feb7.100410.12294@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg> NNTP-Posting-Host: du9ds4.fb9dv.uni-duisburg.de eoahmad@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg (Othman Ahmad) writes: >Juergen Prang (prang@du9ds4.fb9dv.uni-duisburg.de) wrote: >: toonen@mcs.anl.gov (Brian R. Toonen) writes: >: >The solution would appear to be to switch the drive back to translated >: >mode, but this would cause BSD to fail (being my favorite of the three >: >OS's, that would not be the desired effect). Any suggestions or >: >comments other than to remove NT would be greatly appreciated. >: Did you fdisk your drive after you turned off the translation mode ? >: The partition table contains the same limits in cylinder (1024) and sector >: counts (63) that you will find in the BIOS (INT13) interface. Hence >: a change in translation (and, I assume, CMOS entry) will result in a >: totally different disk view to the BIOS that should also be setup in the >: partition table. >: I don't know anything about VMS+1 (WNT ;-), but if it uses BIOS and/or >: partition sector information to find its own partition limits, this may >: be the reason for your problems. But if your partition sector is setup >: correctly for the non-translated drive, it may be a bug in WNT. >: 386BSD won't be bothered by this, because the wd driver uses direct >: information from the drive about its structure together with partition >: and BSD-disklabel information to find its limits, if 386BSD is not on >: the 1st partition (but this is also the reason why 386BSD has problems >: on translated drives). >: BTW, I encountered a strange behavior of Windows 3.1's 32-bit disk access. >: I entered the correct values (i.e. 1053 cyl.) for my Conner 540MB IDE drive >: into the CMOS table, only to be sure 386BSD won't have any problems. But >: this is in discrepancy to the partition table entry for 386BSD, stating >: the last cylinder as 1023 for the reasons mentioned above. This causes >: 32-bit access to complain about an error although this discrepancy is not >: related to the DOS partition. Hence I changed the CMOS table entry to 1023 >: and now Windows' 32bit access works. >: I hope this will not interfere with the disklabel entries for 386BSD, >: which are set up to access the drive under 386BSD up to cylinder 1052 !? >: Any person out there who knows ? >I've no problem with Maxtor LXT-535, a 535 megabyte with recommended 1036, >16 head, 63 sectors configuration, partitioned into 32 Mbyte for DOS, and >the rest for 386bsd. >We have actually partitioned the whole disk to DOS and get 510Mbyte from >chkdsk, using MSDOS 5.0 fdisk and OS. >The rumours(?) that DOS cannot handle more than 1024 cylinders is therefore >false. I did not discuss *DOS-related* problems in my posting but potential problems that may rise from low-level inconsitencies (CMOS table, BIOS, partition table) on large HD's during OS boot phases, depending on what information these OS's use. Of course DOS may be able to handle more than 1024 cylinders (DOS functions 44XXh) as long as these functions will not use BIOS INT13 for low-level HD access. This is beyond my knowledge, since I didn't analyze DOS in detail. Juergen -- Juergen Prang | prang@du9ds4.fb9dv.uni-duisburg.de University of Duisburg |******************************************** Electrical Engineering | Logic is a systematic method of coming Dept. of Dataprocessing | to the wrong conclusion with confidence