Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Sat, 31 Jan 2004 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> Sindi Keesan wrote:
> >
> > The zimage file that is copied to them by make_fd.bat 
> > is always bad.  
> 
> It is strange that I have never run into this problem myself
> (although I only test these things on two computers).  I
> have never had the slightest problem with that routine.
> 
> > We have destroyed at least five floppy disks already.
> 
> I doubt that they are destroyed.  They probably just need
> a proper formatting.



> > Jim thinks you should not be trying to copy a disk image 
> > that is smaller than the disk.
> 
> Interesting point.  The image file is only only 105kb so it 
> will occupy only the beginning of the floppy.  The formatting 
> on the remainder of the floppy comes from whatever system was 
> used to format the disk in the first place.  The worst case 
> scenario is an unformatted floppy:  anything copied to that
> floppy beyond the 105kb will not take.


> I'm not seeing a problem here because my two systems have
> similar alignments on their floppy drives.  However, if your
> drives are out of alignment from mine, there will be a jarring
> inconsistency at 105kb.  Since your problems appear to be with
> zimage, I'm guessing that the inconsistency hits somewhere in
> the middle of that. 

This implies that everyone using your setup will need to have floppy 
drives that are in alignment with yours!  

Jim says 'no kidding' (and some more).  He reformatted by first using a 
bulk tape eraser, then unconditional format with MS DOS 6.22, and the 
disks are still not usable.  

How would you fix the bad clusters on our disks?  We can't.  They seem to 
be physical damage.
 
> > Jim is making his own setup in which the user first has to 
> > make a boot disk, and his steup it will simply copy files to 
> > it and run the batch files to split and combine and things.  
> > No need to copy a disk image.  
> 
> That's the method I used to use.  It should work fine.

He has something working now and I will zip it together and post it for 
people to try out.  It worked on all our computers (the two disks we made 
on one computer work on the other).  Right now he is playing with ramdisks 
to see if the DOS ramdisk memory is freed up to use later for linux, and 
then he would like me to try compiling a smaller kernel so we can use our 
386 with 3M RAM and 30M hard drive for linux.  How much space could I save 
by including in the kernel what is needed to go online, but not including 
module support or printer support or CD-ROM support?  (This may never 
happen, I have other things to do).  

Am I correct that your program makes a 4M RAM disk if you have 8M RAM and 
an additional 4M RAM disk (at /tmp) if you have 12M or more?  I might put 
something in a readme.txt file explaining how to make a larger ramdisk by 
editing autoexec.bat (is that the way to do it?) and increasing by 4096K 
increments.  

> > I said not to make a large disk image since it would take a 
> > while to download 
> 
> I should probably replace bl2-fd.img with a 1.44mb version.
> If I zero out all the bytes beyond 105kb, it shouldn't be much 
> bigger when compressed.  That will eliminate the inconsistency 
> at 105kb, but out-of-alignment floppies could still have a 
> problem reading/writing the floppy.  Although it appears that 
> the single inconsistency at  105kb is a bigger fishhook than 
> overall misalignment.

This still means that you need a perfect 1.44MB floppy disk and we are
running out of those fast.  The older method lets you use disks with a few
bad sectors.  Thanks for working on a fix but I will probably still offer 
our modification to users to play with, assuming James wants to post it.  


> > Any DOS ought to work for making a boot disk.  
> 
> That's what I thought too (when BL1 used that method).  I was
> wrong.  I used to have endless problems when make_fd.bat relied 
> upon people formatting their own floppies.

Problems of users not knowing how to do this?  We could describe the 
details if that helps.    Put disk in drive, type sys a:, do dir/s 
himem.sys, etc.  


> > The ramdisk will probably be Z.  It might be 8M instead of 4M 
> 
> What's the point of 8mb?  Other than making it impossible to
> run on systems with 8mb RAM.
> 
> > to make it 4M or 64M 
> 
> And the purpose of 64mb is?

For people who want to add more programs?  Jim left it as 4M but I might 
try explaining how to make it larger for people who want it larger.


> > Steven may have used DOS 3.3 so that the Ramdisk would always 
> > be C> since  3.3. won't recognize most hard drives 
> 
> I used it because it was the smallest DOS I had that would do
> the job.

So that the .zip file for making floppy disks would be smaller?  
Or is this important when actually booting?

In order to use z: as the ramdisk Jim needed to add himem.sys and some
other program instead of vdisk, or else he would have had to ask the user
to determine what letter to use for the ramdisk.  He thought you used DOS 
3.3 because it won't recognize large hard drives and therefore the ramdisk 
is always C.


> > Does 3.3 recognize CD-ROM drives?  
> 
> Does it matter for a transitory DOS used only to boot a floppy-
> version of Linux?

I don't know - does the presence of a CD-ROM drive affect the drive letter 
of the RAM disk?  

> 
> Cheers,
> Steven
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