[Freemint-list] XHDOSLimits

[Peter Slegg]

This thread reminded me of something.

A few years ago I tried a SATA adapter in the Milan. It
partitioned a 160GB drive but attempts to build an e2fs partition
left it in a state that it never worked again and it would not
re-partition with Mint or Ubuntu.

I blamed the adapter and asked Alan about his experiences with SATA
adapters.

A couple of months ago I got a 160GB IDE drive and had near identical issues.
It partitioned but the last partition could not be initialised as e2fs.

I tried a few times and then gave up. I partitioned about 132GB of the
drive and mke2fs worked almost immediately.

I've been testing this ever since and it seems to be ok.

Did I hit some limit or some odd behaviour with this size of drive ?


Regards,

Peter



On Thu, 11 Aug 2016 12:00:01 , freemint-list-request at atariforge.org wrote:
> Send Freemint-list mailing list submissions to
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>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2016 20:51:50 +0200
> From: Jo Even Skarstein <joska at online.no>
> Subject: [Freemint-list] XHDOSLimits
> To: freemint-list <freemint-list at mail.atariforge.org>
>
> Hi,
>
> During a conversation with Uwe Seimet on another topic (not
> MiNT-related), the following question came up:
>
> "As far as I can tell when MiNT is initializing it does not (I think it
> did a long time ago) call XHDOSLimits() in order to update XHDI
> compatible drivers with information on the actual MiNT GEMDOS limits. As
> a result with MiNT and HDDRIVER you cannot access more than 16 BIOS
> drives, and FAT partition sizes are also more limited than they would
> have to be. Only after calling XHDOSLimits() and increasing XH_DL_DRIVES
> to 32 with a separate program more than 16 BIOS drives work. Actually,
> MiNT should do the required calls during initialization, just like
> Big-DOS does it, at least that was the initial idea, when XHDOSLimits()
> was added to XHDI long ago."
>
> I believe I understand the issue, but I don't know the topic well enough
> to confirm that the situation is as he describes. Does anybody know?
>
> Jo Even
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2016 21:37:31 +0200
> From: Jo Even Skarstein <joska at online.no>
> Subject: Re: [Freemint-list] XHDOSLimits
> To: freemint-list at mail.atariforge.org
>
> On on., 2016-08-10 at 20:51 +0200, Jo Even Skarstein wrote:
>
> > "As far as I can tell when MiNT is initializing it does not (I think it
> > did a long time ago) call XHDOSLimits() in order to update XHDI
> > compatible drivers with information on the actual MiNT GEMDOS limits. As
> > a result with MiNT and HDDRIVER you cannot access more than 16 BIOS
> > drives, and FAT partition sizes are also more limited than they would
> > have to be. Only after calling XHDOSLimits() and increasing XH_DL_DRIVES
> > to 32 with a separate program more than 16 BIOS drives work. Actually,
> > MiNT should do the required calls during initialization, just like
> > Big-DOS does it, at least that was the initial idea, when XHDOSLimits()
> > was added to XHDI long ago."
>
> More details from Uwe:
>
> "By the way, this is what MiNT should do: For each XHDI DOS limit (see
> XHDI specification or http://toshyp.atari.org/en/010008.html for
> details) MiNT should call XHDOSLimits() and set the limit to the limit
> actually implemented/supported by MiNT. That's all."
>
> Jo Even
>
>