[MiNT] Another tale from Remi... ;-)

[maxilys@normandnet.fr (Remi Villatel)]

Hi everybody,

I just got an IDE 6.8 Mb hard disk. I wanted to split it in 9 partitions to 
reproduce my current setting on one single drive, with just more space on every 
partition ...and I didn't succeed!  :'-(

HDDriver recognized the hard disk very well, I could partition it the way I 
wanted. I re-booted and I expected my configuration to contain 20 partitions. 
(2*9 plus the internal EZ-135 and the CD-ROM.)

I opened a window on the root (U:) (I'm talking more like a linuxian than a 
minter... mintian?)  ;-)  and everybody was there, from /a to /v, except /b of 
course. (I made no partition bigger than 1000 Mb so I could leave them as BGM 
in order to test.)

I opened the shell window and type just 'ls'... Aaarrrgh! 'ls' said that it 
couldn't open /q /s /t and /v. (My CD-ROM is on /r and U:/u is too "circular" 
IMHO.) The 4 last partitions had disappeared!

The question is: Do these partitions exist or not? If they appear on the root, 
they exist... but if it's impossible to access them, they don't exist... I'm 
wondering: does MiNT contained some kind of "blurred logic" instead of binary 
logic?

I made several tests. I put all the partitions of the hard disk in the NEWFATFS 
list, I removed them from it, I used BigDOS... No way! /q, /s /t and /v were 
out of reach. In the meantime, I discovered that, at boot time, HD-Driver 
recognized the partitions only up to P: (that's why I tried BigDOS).

Will I ask questions? No, I won't... But if somebody can answer to my 
unformulated questions, I won't refuse.  ;-)

I changed my mind and my intentions. I splitted the hard disk in 3: 1 ext2 
partition for MiNT, 1 private minix partition for the long names, and the last 
one in minix as backup partition. (I still appreciate very much the LFN-to-8+3 
converter.) Then, no P:-limit problem any more, I could give my 1.2 Gb backup 
IDE disk to my Linux-box and switch off that noisy external SCSI disk on which 
my MiNT setup was.

Everything was fine... I made my 3 partitions, I changed them into minix and 
ext2 ones. I made the copies with that sloooooow 'cp' (apart from the flags 
problem, Kobold didn't like partitions bigger that 2 Gb). I was in heaven when 
I finished to backup my 7 TOSFS partitions...  ;-)

And I fell right down to hell yesterday night... Why? Just because I read in 
some Atari newsgroup that Minix is limited to 2 Gb. (I can't retrieve where 
right now.) I began to feel some doubts when I remembered that it was something 
I've already read somewhere... And you can calculate the way you want but 6.8/3 
is bigger than 2 Gb.

I looked on the desktop, I used 'df -k'. The numbers weren't exactly the same 
but, whichever way I calculated it, I found that my 2 minix partitions were 
just above 2.12 Gb. Question: Is this another attack of the "blurred logic" or 
is there some misinformation floating around Minix? I checked those 2 
partitions several times, even uncleany unmounted, no problem so far. Even 
Kobold accepted to work with them, once the free space went below 2 Gb.

So? Should I stop believing all that I read? (I'm a kinda naive.)  ;-) ...Or 
should I expect some problem sooner or later with these partitions?

What?... Who said that I'm talkative?  ;-)

See you later,

=============================
Remi Villatel
E-mail: maxilys@normandnet.fr
=============================