*BSD News Article 26335


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
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From: sdslavin@pegasus2.astro.indiana.edu (Shawn Slavin)
Subject: Interesting behavior with pcfs
Message-ID: <CJzGGy.G5t@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>
Sender: news@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu (USENET News System)
Nntp-Posting-Host: pegasus2.astro.indiana.edu
Organization: Indiana University Astronomy Department
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 1994 14:05:21 GMT
Lines: 33


Hi there.  I have been using pcfs mounted floppies for almost all my
installation, the other being modem transfer.  So far, I have had absolute
success with moving files from DOS formatted floppies to my wd0 hard disk,
using pcfs with a mount point on the wd0 drive.

Well, I have a second (wd1) drive, which I use for my own personal disk space
(as opposed to system stuff).  I wanted something off of a floppy, so I did the
usual su, mount -t pcfs /dev/fd0a /floppy, and then cp /floppy/* /users/
where /users is the wd1 partition.  This works normally if you substitute
/users/ for /usr/, which is the wd0 partition.  BUT, the file transfer stars,
goes about a megabyte or so (cache length?) and then "NNGNGNNGNG!"  My disk
starts making this horrific sound, and I have to do a hard reset.

I thought, "Damn, my disk is screwed."  Well, I have done all kinds of I/O from
wd0 to wd1, to see if I can repeat the problem with wd1, but it appears to be
fine.

My question:  Is there some bug where copying from /dev/fd0a through a mount
point on wd0a to wd1c screws up?  I have tried different floppys, and I get the
same results.  Is it caching 1MB or so, and then not able to find where to
continue after it dumps it?  I'm curious

This is not imperative, since I have no problem moving stuff to wd0 and then to
wd1, if I need to.  It's just kind of wierd.

Also, my setup:

Dell i486/50 using SYSCONS driver
wd0 => Western Digital Caviar 2340 (340MB IDE)
wd1 =>    "       "      "    2170 (170MB IDE)

Thanks.