New improved dplace

[Dave Lampe]

Super dplace is back on the air. Now 113 Megabytes strong!

A couple of months ago I decided I was tired or running out of disk
blocks and inodes on my 67 meg UNIX PC. It was time to replace the
original drive with the biggest I could find. Thanks to Craig Voltava
ihnp4!ihlpm!cmv and Lenny Tropiano icus!lenny I had the hardware
changes that were necessary to undo some of the brain damage that
was done by AT&T/CT. More help from Mark Cravitts and Mark Hampton
got me a programmed PAL to make the change. The fastest big disk I
could find was a Priam #519 15 head, 1224 cylinder, 20 msec drive.

After making all the changes, checking everthing 4 times (a misrouted
wire found on the first check scared me) I loaded the diagnostic disk
and started the format. Wonder of wonders, the format succeded. Then
I started rebuilding the file system. I knew things were going too fast.
I couldn't mount the disk after the mkfs. To make things worse, while
experimenting I destroyed the low level format on the disk (don't try
to put 20 blocks on a 10,416 byte track, it won't fit). NO problem,
just run iv. Right, only iv is not listed on the diagnostic disk.
After some more experiments I found that it is there - 6,4 under the
expert prompt. Does anyone know what all the options are?

While I was trying to recover from that disaster, I found out that
the hardware may handle more than 1024 tracks, but the software won't.
The kernal and the device driver have both been brain damaged to limit
the track number to 1024. That information is thanks to Mark Hilliard
and Dave Solon.

Thanks to everyone on the net who offered help and advice.

Dave Lampe
{ihnp4 | ames | lll-tis | sun | pyramid}!pacbell!dplace!djl
(415) 455-1571