*BSD News Article 15484


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From: milr@quads.uchicago.edu (mark ryan miller)
Subject: device drivers (please help!)
Message-ID: <1993May2.122328.6368@midway.uchicago.edu>
Sender: news@uchinews.uchicago.edu (News System)
Reply-To: milr@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago
References: <C67389.3Fsp@austin.ibm.com> <1s0cjl$1532@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu>
Date: Sun, 2 May 1993 12:23:28 GMT
Lines: 25

Can anyone give me some help in writing a 3 1/2" disk drive device driver
for an IBM RT?? I have installed a 3 1/2" (720K) drive in this machine,    
which normally doesn't handle this size.  The hardware works fine,
and under my DOS simulator, I can read and write to the floppy.
But, my machine thinks it's a 1.2 meg floppy.

I've been using a package called MTOOLS which allows you to read/write
MSDOS disks on Unix systems.  If I format the 3 1/2 as a 360K then
format with mtools, it can read/write the drive!!  But if I try
to read this on a PC, there are read problems at the last 200K or
so on the disk.  Plus, disks formatted on the PC can't be read
on my machine.  I get an "unformatted" media message... maybe because
it is expecting (/dev/fd1) 80 x 2 x 15 and is getting 80 x 2 x 9.

I would really appreciate it if someone could give me some help
in writing a device driver for this machine, or point me in the
right direction towards existing software.  I've done some
basic programming in C and assembler, so I can do some of the
work.  I'd really like to talk to someone who has done something
like this before.

Thanks for any help.

--Mark Miller