Re: 2.88 MB Floppy Drives

From: Bill Vermillion (bv_at_wjv.comREMOVE)
Date: 03/26/04 

Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 05:45:00 GMT

In article <L-Odnc68NMxhKf7dRVn-jg@comcast.com>,
Brian K. White <brian@aljex.com> wrote:
>Transpower wrote:
>>> I'm interested in the part about /etc/init. What is this "an error
>>> message" that you get? What release of OpenServer are you making
>>> these boot floppies for? And from what release must you grab
>>> /etc/init to overcome this error message?
>>>
>>
>> I'm on 5.0.7. With the current /etc/init, I would get the message
>> "WARNING: exit - /etc/init (PID) died, status 0x0000008B" and the
>> Root diskette would thus fail. No problem with substituting an
>> earlier version of /etc/init, like from 5.0.4. As for attempting to
>> copy 1.68 MB to a 1.44 MB floppy, that certainly would not qualify as
>> good systems engineering practice.
>>
>> Transpower

>Apparently renegade fringe organizations like IBM didn't get that memo,
>seeing as how they distributed OS/2 on 1.8M floppies. :)

>There is nothing wrong with it. It's not like overclocking a
>cpu. It's just a different distribution of sector sizes and
>number of inodes and such to essentially waste less space on
>formatting overhead. It's no more wrong or unwise than using that
>non-standard unix filesystem instead of the universally accepted
>ntfs.

I haven't look at disk controller specs in a very long time but in
the far past - depending on the chip - you could choose your choice
of formats from two sets - and IBM set and another set.

The IBM set had four sector size default. 256, 512, 1024, and
2048. The non-IBM set went very low - at least as low as 128 bytes
sector, and in more increments than in even multiples as in the IBM
standards. The top size as I recall was 4096 byte sectors.

Having most things on 512 byte sectors makes things easier. Sector
sizes for such things as ECC formatting were in the 570byte range
as I recall.

So when you say 'IBM didn't get the memo' - they were just
following the standards they had set in the 1970s.

Number of inodes has nothing to do with formatting as formatting is
the lowest level and then it is up to the end user to determine how
they will organize the groups of sectors.

And what did you mean by the line 'non-standard unix filesystem'.
There are so many Unix file system standards it's hard to keep them
straight :-)

Bill 

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com

Relevant Pages

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