[Coco] Hard Drive Problems

[Boisy G. Pitre]

On Jun 15, 2004, at 12:01 AM, Allen Huffman wrote:

> I'm still here, gang -- haven't had time to move to the CF card but 
> have picked up another 128MB and a 256MB (got $30!) so I'm ready to do 
> more when I find the time.
>
> Did anyone ever chime in about the state of Glenside IDE drivers?  Or 
> alternates?

Allen,

I don't know anything about the Glenside IDE drivers, but I can give 
you an update on the upcoming Super Drivers from Cloud-9.

Basically, they are done and are working.  I am waiting on Mark to 
finish some things on his end so that he can beta test both the SCSI 
and IDE drivers, since I want some testing done before releasing them.

(1) Both the SCSI and IDE drivers support the SS.DSize command, which 
returns back the sector size of the drive, as well as the number of 
sectors that the drive has.  This is a very nice feature, since it 
allows programs such as format to query the size of the drive and then 
format the drive based on the returned values.  This means that there 
really is no longer a need to set up your descriptor's IT.CYL, IT.SID 
and IT.SCT values.

(2) Format has been updated to look for a bit in the device descriptor 
which tells it whether or not to attempt the SS.DSize command, and if 
so, to do the GetStat and use those values to format the drive.  Of 
course, if you have a descriptor set up to access a partition on a hard 
drive, you will want to clear this bit and set the IT.CYL/IT.SID/IT.SCT 
values accordingly.  To effectively use the drive size query  feature 
will require NitrOS-9 V03.02.02, which will be available at the same 
time as the Super Drivers package.

(3) The IDE driver supports ATAPI devices such as CD-ROMs and ZIP 
drives.  Also the driver automatically detects LBA or CHS mode, so that 
saves a bit in the device descriptor as well.

(4) Smart caching is still employed... your cache will grow to 
accommodate the largest sector-sized device on the system.

All in all, this is going to be a nice driver set.

> 		A
>
>
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