Re: 2.88 MB Floppy Drives

From: D. Thomas Podnar (tom_at_microlite.com)
Date: 03/26/04 

Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 09:21:05 -0500

Brian K. White 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'm going to surmise that he meant that he is using an older version
of the UniTrends CTAR/AirBag product, which wouldn't have noticed that
5.0.7 /etc/init requires additional shared libraries to be placed on the
AirBag diskettes. His solution was to use an init that didn't
use the new libraries, which would at least let him get to an
AirBag menu.

There may be other things on the boot media besides /etc/init
that would require the newer libraries. Transpower, you'll
want to check the rest of the boot media before relying on them.

I'll also surmise that UniTrends found and fixed that in versions of
AirBag released after 5.0.7 shipped and that an upgrade to a newer
release is the correct solution.

As for the 1.68 floppy issue, well, if I'm surmising correctly,
he can't modify someone elses product to do that easily. 

-- 
Best Regards,
Tom
---
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