From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Jul 16 06:23:44 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id GAA22956 for questions-outgoing; Tue, 16 Jul 1996 06:23:44 -0700 (PDT) Received: from webster.telebit.com (webster.telebit.com [143.191.3.1]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id GAA22948 for ; Tue, 16 Jul 1996 06:23:42 -0700 (PDT) Received: from Chelmsford.Telebit.COM (sharps.chelmsford.telebit.com) by webster.telebit.com (4.1/SMI-4.1/Telebit.COM-Sendmail-V4.3) id AA06176 to freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Tue, 16 Jul 96 09:23:11 EDT Received: from smtpgate.chelmsford.telebit.com by Chelmsford.Telebit.COM (4.1/SMI-4.1-pmm-2) id AA18739; Tue, 16 Jul 96 09:23:10 EDT Received: from ccMail by smtpgate.chelmsford.telebit.com (SMTPLINK V2.10.05) id AA837534837; Tue, 16 Jul 96 09:19:38 EST Date: Tue, 16 Jul 96 09:19:38 EST From: "Nathan Melhorn" Message-Id: <9606168375.AA837534837@smtpgate.chelmsford.telebit.com> To: n_melhor@webster.Telebit.COM, dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re[2]: Adding devices to boot.flp Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On 13 July 96 Doug White wrote: > On Thu, 11 Jul 1996, Nathan Melhorn wrote: >> I was fairly successful adding parallel port IoMega ZipDrive > WHAT?!?!? You have a parallel Zip working? Whoa! What did you do, > write a driver? I thought the parallel wasn't supported and wasn't > for a very long time. The SCSI works OK. IOMega didn't offer anything. Searching the net, I found: http://www.torque.net/zip.html {mostly Linux ->} http://www.prism.uvsq.fr/~son/ppa3.html {FreeBSD ->} ftp://www.prism.uvsq.fr/~son/ppa3.c {the source} Nicolas Souchu has ported a Linux driver, but hasn't had time to do more work on it. I tried his driver on my machine. After changing the printer port from 0x278 to 0x378 and all int32->int32_t and u_int32->u_int32_t I got a kernel that could access the drive. The only problem is in the device probing at boot time, which takes about 2 minutes for the Zip! This didn't seem to depend on SCSI_DELAY perceptibly. As long as I can stand the long boot time, I've got a ZipDrive. Nicolas says he doesn't have time right now to work on this, and I may glance at it. There are some DELAY() ?? calls.. The only (other) problem is in accessing my MSDOS/FAT file systems. It occurs both for the hard drive and now for the Zip drive -- if I get too "busy" on the drive, the FAT structure seems to crash. When I boot back to MS-DOS, chkdisk/scandisk shows errors which I let it repair. It seems to happen more when fooling around with directories (vs. ordinary files). Thus, so far I first stage data on my Unix file systems, such as .zip and .tar.gz files, and then copy it once to an MS-DOS file system. Is FreeBSD's MSDOS file system less solid than the native file system, especially under heavy/multitasking load? Are there known concurrency problems? I've still to format a ZipDisk as a native Unix file system. > In response to your query, though, building a boot floppy is a long > and difficult process, basically requiring one to build the whole > release. Oh.. too bad. My machine at work is on the net, but the machine at home is not, and doesn't have a compatible CD-ROM drive. I'd like to copy a release to a ZipDisk and take it home to install. I'd thus need Zip drivers (or drivers for my CDROM) in a boot floppy. I think. I have full sources right now -- it isn't just "cd /usr/src/floppy" and then typing "make"? -Nate Melhorn (n_melhor@chelmsford.telebit.com)