Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2001 12:00:35 +0100 From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> To: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@info.iet.unipi.it> Cc: Josef Karthauser <joe@tao.org.uk>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: howto access an oddly shaped partition on a floppy ? Message-ID: <27657.984135635@critter> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 09 Mar 2001 11:58:55 %2B0100." <200103091058.LAA48632@info.iet.unipi.it>
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In message <200103091058.LAA48632@info.iet.unipi.it>, Luigi Rizzo writes: >> What about having the first few tracks, ie. the boot area, 18 sectors, >> and the rest of the disk 21 sectors, and have the boot code/kernel do >> the right thing? Isn't this easier? > >It has all sorts of problems: neither the bios nor the disklabel >nor the kernel can handle variable length tracks, plus the bootloader >(boot2 and /boot/loader) still uses the bios, so the whole area >containing the kernel would need to be 18 sectors, and the kernel >on picobsd is almost as large as the whole disk... It would be possible to teach the floppy driver that cyl 0-9 has 18 sectors while cyl10-81 has 21. A small matter of hacking... -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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