2.88 MB Floppy Drives
Transpower
diskette. So a couple of months ago I purchased a Teac 2.88 MB floppy drive
from GigaBite Solutions. It works fine: I can now create CTAR and SCO Boot
and Root floppies without a problem. The /etc/init file must come from an
earlier version, or else you will get an error message, preventing the Root
floppy from working. Other than that, it's smooth sailing.
Transpower
trans...@aol.com
Jean-Pierre Radley
You might have avoided purchasing that 2.88 drive. On OSR 5.0.7, using my
"regular" old floppy drive, reading and writing 1.68Mb floppies (using my
stock of years-old 3.5" floppy disks) works just fine, and it might have
sufficed for your pruposes.
--
JP
Bela Lubkin
As JPR points out, you can make 1.68MB floppies using a standard 1.44MB
drive, which might be big enough for the purpose. Or might now.
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?
>Bela<
Transpower
>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
Brian K. White
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.
--
Brian K. White -- br...@aljex.com -- http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
+++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++.
filePro BBx Linux SCO Prosper/FACTS AutoCAD #callahans Satriani
Jean-Pierre Radley
Just run mkdev hd and try making a 1.68 floppy using an old "1.44" floppy
drive and an old "1.44" floppy diskette.
--
JP
Bill Vermillion
Brian K. White <br...@aljex.com> 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 haven't look at disk controller specs in a very long time but in
the far past - depending on the chip - you could choose your choice
of formats from two sets - and IBM set and another set.
The IBM set had four sector size default. 256, 512, 1024, and
2048. The non-IBM set went very low - at least as low as 128 bytes
sector, and in more increments than in even multiples as in the IBM
standards. The top size as I recall was 4096 byte sectors.
Having most things on 512 byte sectors makes things easier. Sector
sizes for such things as ECC formatting were in the 570byte range
as I recall.
So when you say 'IBM didn't get the memo' - they were just
following the standards they had set in the 1970s.
Number of inodes has nothing to do with formatting as formatting is
the lowest level and then it is up to the end user to determine how
they will organize the groups of sectors.
And what did you mean by the line 'non-standard unix filesystem'.
There are so many Unix file system standards it's hard to keep them
straight :-)
Bill
--
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com
Stuart J. Browne
"Jean-Pierre Radley" <j...@jpr.com> wrote in message
news:2004032523...@jpradley.jpr.com...
I'm just amazed you found not only a drive, but working media for that
thing!
D. Thomas Podnar
> 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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Transpower
Very interesting.
Tom:
I'm using the current CTAR release and it does require the "old" /etc/init.
Apparently everything else is OK with it.
Transpower
Jean-Pierre Radley
If the current release of CTAR does not work with the current release of
OpenServer 5, then consider getting a refund for your "current" CTAR and
switching to a backup suite which does work. :-)
--
JP