ultrix disktab entry for an RF73?

From: Carlos Murillo <cem14_at_cornell.edu>
Date: Wed Nov 1 23:27:27 2000

At 08:11 PM 11/1/00 -0800, you wrote:
>As the RF73 is a DSSI disk the notion of "cylinders, sectors, etc" are not
>as useful as they were on the old MFM, SMD, and ESDI drives. In particular
>the controller simply returns the block you asked for and does its own
>access sorting.
>
>In NetBSD you can query the raw device to get the total sectors (I don't
>know if you can do this in Ultrix or not). Anyway, if you do that then you
>can factor that total number and make up some cylinder/heads/sectors numbers.

Very true. However, have you noticed how insistent the NetBSD guys
are about assigning a whole cylinder (however artificial the concept
of a cylinder may be at this stage, especially after auto map-out
of defective sectors) to the boot block? Yes, their boot block
spills past the partition table, but to insist on skipping a whole
cylinder when assigning the "a" partition, aw, c'mon... I recently
installed a system in which following their advice would have meant
to forgo about 2MB of storage...

>As for AltaVista I gave it up for Google.com, why? because google's search
>page is advertisement free and it returns better hits than Altavista does.
>
>--Chuck

... and if you can use it w/o IE, that's a major plus. One of my pet peeves
is when some app that doesn't really have to do with html insists on
installing IE so that you can browse its "improved" help/docs
(In particular, Digital Visual Fortran). It took a long time, but
I actually managed once to modify all that registry crap so that
DVF's help works with netscape. Otherwise, I would not have used their
help system. Simply put.

carlos.
Received on Wed Nov 01 2000 - 23:27:27 GMT