[N8VEM: 16741] Some CUBIX Observations

[AG5AT]

I have been digging into disk sizing for CUBIX.

While the author says that it will support 32 mb disk sizes, there are a
number of things that don't jive. Since he wrote it on 360K floppies there
are a number of things that have smaller limits.

The most notable is the chkdisk utility. It tries to do all of it's work
in memory. So if you try to do a chkdisk on a 32 mb disk you are
guaranteed to:

a) crash you system
b) if you are using 28c16a flash proms, you will generally corrupt it by
writting over some of it.

I tried 8 mb and that is still to big. So the next is 4 mb and all seems
to work well there.

chkdisk /nomedia d:
now works and doesn't crash the world.

I will have to come up with a corrected cubxprpc/d or in my case kubxprpc/d.

So the entries in drivers.asm look like:

* DEFAULT DRIVE CHARACTISTICS
FCB 0,80,2,9,0,0,0 ADR 0, 80 CYL, 2 HEAD, 9 SEC/TRK
FCB 1,32,1,255,0,0,0 ADR 1, 32 CYL, 1 HEAD, 255 SEC/TRK, ATAPI
ZIP DISK
FCB 2,32,1,255,0,0,0 ADR 2, 32 CYL, 1 HEAD, 255 SEC/TRK
FCB 3,32,1,255,0,0,0 ADR 3, 32 CYL, 1 HEAD, 255 SEC/TRK

What I have been doing so far is run cubxprpc/d and then once booted up:

format c:
or
format d:

To prevent the clobbering of the 28c16a, we need to come up with something
that disconnects the R/W from the chip and I think tie the chip's R/W high.


Aug
In Arkansas