*BSD News Article 37404


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!wgb
From: wgb@netcom.com (William G. Bosacker)
Subject: HD w/ > 1024 cylinders
Message-ID: <wgbCyGx8M.Ixw@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL1]
Date: Sun, 30 Oct 1994 04:17:10 GMT
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I thank you Gene for being nice enough to at least say something about the
problem I was referring to.  To the other people who have been using FreeBSD
for some time and know something about internals, I will not be so kind.  I
have only been using FreeBSD for about a month now, on and off, and I have
found a way to fix the problem and will have finished it this weekend (more on
this later).  But one thing that really erks me is the complacency of the
veteran users.  I have been programming for the past 17 years, since I was 14
and have been getting paid for doing it the last 15.  I have also taught
different things about computers over the years, and not once have I ever told
anyone who needed help and asked for it intelligently, "to take a flying leep",
like most of the people here have.  I don't think the founders of the Internet
ever intended it users to act in such a way.  Enough said.....

As far as the fix goes, it took me a couple of weeks to go through the source
code, which if you've ever looked at it you'd understand why it took so long.
Anyway, the fix entails changes to 'boot2.c', 'asm.S', 'wd.c', 'wdreg.h', and
a few others as well as an additional header file.  If you have a controller
that supports LBA translations (which includes a drive that also supports it)
and has BIOS that support it, then this will work.  I believe I calculated it
out and found that MS-DOS can support a drive up to 2TB in size using LBA
translations.

Now if you have any questions, I will be more than happy to answer them.
Since I've only been on the Internet about a month and a half, I am not sure
how to send the fixes to anyone who needs them, or how I should take care of
that.  Any help in that area would be greatly appreciated.

Later guys......