I was wrong: Enix DOES work with my 300MB disk (re: Which 386 Unix?)

[Mark McWiggins]

Thanks to those who jogged my memory about the tricks smart disk controllers
can play.  I had installed my disk and controller (CDC 94186-383H/DTC 6280)
6 weeks ago and had forgotten that it had a "fake 1024 cyliner mode" to
fool dumb OS's that have a 1024-cylinder restriction on disk drives.  It
also comes with a "keep spare sectors" mode, which tells it to set aside
1 sector per track as an alternate, instead of marking the whole track bad
when it found 1 sector.

I turned on both of these options when low-level formatting, and VOILA!  I
got the system up.  

In my haste upon my initial trouble with my free beta-version Enix (act in 
haste, repent at leisure) I ordered AT&T Sys V/386.  I didn't realize that
Everex had inherited the disk set-up procedure straight from AT&T!  Aside
from the AT&T version being slower, it failed the same way, "253 bad
sectors found -- start over at a cylinder other that 0."  My disk has

	17 sectors/track x 15 heads(tracks)/cylinder x 1224 cylinders =

			312120 sectors

In other words, the setup procedure wants to abandon the disk as unusable
if it finds 1 in every 1233 sectors bad.  BARF!

As it turns out, I must have a quite reliable disk (with fewer than .1% bad
sectors), or even with the controller trick I played I couldn't have gotten 
the system up.  It formatted to just about 300 MB.  It's also FAST (14.5 ms 
access).  I love it!

Now for the good news.  I've been speaking with one of the engineers at
Everex, and they seem to be committed to fixing the system.  My contact
there claims that the other little glitches I've noticed have already
been fixed, and the disk handler and setup procedures are being rewritten
to accomodate bigger disks.

I haven't tried everything yet, but the system seems mostly solid.  
It does run Xenix 286 binaries as advertised. The system comes up in CGA 
mode (fixed in the next release, supposedly), but a 5-line C program with an 
ioctl call took care of that.  Console multi-screens work, though the 
keystroke sequence (ALT-PrintScreen-Fn) is more painful than Xenix's.  
Supposedly this is remappable, but I don't have much documentation yet, 
and what I have (marked "Enix System V 386 Release Notes") is not very 
impressive: no index, weird organization, etc.  The system comes with
binary X Windows, which installed OK; it came up when I ran it, but I
have no docs for it and don't know anything else. 

And wonder of wonders: sdb works!  I haven't had a working source-level 
debugger in 5 years, not since I worked on a Pyramid running 4.2BSD.  
(The Xenix 286 version of sdb is a bad joke, for example.)

Overall, I'm reserving final judgement, but I think Enix is going to
work for me.  I'm not sure when they'll be shipping the Real Version,
but the contact at Everex is Brian Brinkerhoff (415-683-3649).

I have no affiliation with Everex, other than a satisfied user of their
tape drive, and a potentially satisfied Enix user.
-- 

Mark McWiggins			UUCP:		uunet!intek01!mark
DISCLAIMER: I could be wrong.	INTERNET:	intek01!mark at uunet.uu.net
						(206) 455-9935