Diskette light

[James Van Artsdalen]

IN article <76 at carpet.WLK.COM>, bill at carpet.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) wrote:
> [...]  From
> time to time the floppy drive zero activity light stays on after
> V/AT has loaded from the hard disk.  Other times it goes off.  If
> I boot DOS from the hard disk it _always_ goes off.  This is a
> 12MHz AT clone of some kind with a Phoenix BIOS.

After a disk access, your BIOS waits a little bit before turning off the
drive.  This is a good thing because it can save startup time if you do a
disk access soon after a previous access, but not right away.  This problem
is that when uPort starts up, it has to disconnect BIOS, and hence BIOS
sometimes never gets a chance to turn the drive motor back off.  What
*should* happen is that uPort should turn off the floppy disk after booting,
but...  I got around this problem in an interesting way.  I deliberately
fragmented my root partition and then re-copied /unix.  I then ran fsck -S
to clean it up again.  The result is that booting takes long enough to let the
floppy drive turn off before unix takes over.  Ugly, but it works...-- 
James R. Van Artsdalen   ...!ut-sally!utastro!bigtex!james   "Live Free or Die"
Home: 512-346-2444 Work: 328-0282; 110 Wild Basin Rd. Ste #230, Austin TX 78746