[openbeos] Re: mkdos and DriveSetup

  • From: "Zenja Solaja" <zenja@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <dos4gw@xxxxxx>
  • Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2002 17:10:45 +1100

Hey Marcus.  I'm suprised that you're having problems with DriveSetup, since
I had the reverse problem.  The version of fdisk shipped with Win98 wouldn't
see anything bigger than 33Gb (the 24bit cylinder/head/sector problem) and
the only way I could initialise the disk was with DriveSetup within BeOS.
Even Win2K wouldn't initialise the disk to anything beyond 33Gb per
partition.  BTW - when using DriveSetup, make sure that you haven't got
'automount' active, otherwise you'll lock up DriveSetup the minute you
initialise the disk (a bug worth fixing).
Take care.

PS - cool email address.


-----Original Message-----
From: openbeos-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:openbeos-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Marcus Overhagen
Sent: Sunday, 27 January 2002 3:03 PM
To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [openbeos] mkdos and DriveSetup


Hi,

I noticed that DriveSetup fails to initialize partitions with the dosfs
(dos/windows file system, FAT32) when the partition is larger than
32GB (It's 38 GB here, and I want to use BeOS to initialize it :-)

Further investigation showed that DriveSetup uses add-ons
contained in /boot/beos/system/add-ons/drive_setup/fs
to do the job, but the "dos" add-on executes the mkdos
program, which failes.

| $ /boot/home/config/be/Preferences/deviceSetup
| will not prompt for confirmation
| using a 32-bit fat
| geometry: cylinders = 1, sectors = 80019765, heads = 1
| BIOS geometry: cylinders = 1024, sectors = 63, heads = 255
| mkdos error: Calculated sectors/cluster too large (128).
| Try using a larger sized FAT

Since FAT32 supports drive sizes up to 2 Terabyte,
I decided to write a replacement of mkdos. The core
functionality should be finished by tomorrow. Calculation of
sectors/cluster is already working fine :)

usage: mkdos [-n] [-t] [-f 12|16|32] device [volume_label]
        -n, --noprompt  do not prompt before writing
       -t, --test      enable test mode (will not write to disk)
       -f, --fat       use FAT entries of the specified size

The remaining problem is evaluation of arguments,
which I never did before. I hope somebody can help me,

By the way, this is the way it is used by DriveSetup,
but I would like to have it working from the shell also.

argv[1] = -n
argv[2] = -f
argv[3] = 32
argv[4] = /dev/disk/ide/ata/1/master/0/0_0
argv[5] = daten_1

A few remaining questions, to be answered by the Preference team:
Anyone already doing this?  Should I stop? Are you working on a
DriveSetup replacement?

regards
Marcus (media kit team :)

PS:
I need some volunteers to test it, once it's finished.



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