Date: Tue, 16 Jul 96 09:19:38 EST From: "Nathan Melhorn" <n_melhor@webster.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 Message-ID: <9606168375.AA837534837@smtpgate.chelmsford.telebit.com>
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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 <Nicolas.Souchu@prism.uvsq.fr> 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)
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