Hi,
This is a message from Manuel Bilderbeek, which was rejected because it
contained an attachment. The full message (excluding attachment) is below.
> It's attached. The file is also here:
> http://www.funet.fi/pub/msx/utils/harddisk/novaxtab.pma
> Sorry for posting it on the newsgroup, I'm too lazy to make seperate
> posts. It's probably filtered out on the mailinglist... :-)
No, it is not filtered; it is sent to the admins who have to clear up your
mess... Grmbl...
(no hard feelings, just don't make a habit of it)
Bye,
Maarten
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Roderik Muit wrote:
> My mailer screwed up and didn't CC the news message to mailboxes...
Ah, thanks anyway for your response!
I'm writing here a small reaction. I'm not in the tech stuff, but very
interested anyway.
>>Hi,
>>
>>Well, some people still know me (and flood my mailbox) It's OK, I've woken
>>up now.. ;-p
>>Since I'm seeing this message from 4 directions, I'll answer them all too.
Thanks again! :-)
>>(amazing to see a mailinglist + a newsgroup both still working... I had no
>>idea...)
It has been all the time!
>>Well, yeah, maybe. I'm not so good at keeping backups from things that
>
> were
>
>>'5 harddisks ago'. I can find out over the weekend whether I still have
>>something...
Please do so. I guess anything is useful.
>>For starters,
>>- MAP.COM was written by Gert de Boom
>>- the Novaxis SCSI BIOS was written by Jurgen Kramer - you've got the info
>>from that one on ftp.funet.fi already, apparently.
Those docs seem to be quite good. The problem was to get the info about
the partition types...
>>- NFDISK was written by me, using windowing routines from Jeffrey Timmer
>
> and
>
>>in v1.2 some code from a friend from a friend in Tilburg, whose name I
>>forgot...
What changed in version 1.2?
I myself have always used 1.2.
>>As far as I can make out, it's the info on the partition types you're
>>looking for.
Exactly.
[info about partition types]
>>I think I wrote some documentation on it. I hope so, since I'm not
>
> planning
>
>>to delve into assembly code in order to get that info. (Although it would
>
> be
>
>>nice to see how unstructured I programmed back then :-)
Please try to find that documentation back! :-)
But thanks already for your remembered info!
>>The 'Extended' format uses sectors elsewhere on the disk, as does the
>>BERT/HPN format.
>>The fourth entry in the 'normal pc' partition table in this case does not
>>contain data about a partition, but points to another sector somewhere on
>>the harddisk which holds data on more partitions (i.e. more sets of these
>
> 32
>
>>bytes, at the same position as sector 0). That's the main idea.
>>On normal PC's, this is only done once, i.e. you have maximum 2 sectors
>
> with
>
>>partition data - one with info about 3 partitions + a pointer to the
>
> second
>
>>sector, and one with 4 partitions. So you can have max. 7 partitions on a
>>PC.
>>Note that this format is NOT supported by NFDISK (or any other MSX program
You mean the PC way of doing it is not supported by NFDISK?
> I
>
>>know). Back then I did not know anything about how the PC does extended
>>partitions, so I just created some partitions with a BERT interface, saw
>
> how
>
>>they did it, copied that, and assumed that that was how the PC did it too.
Apparantly it is not: according to Maico Arts you can only read the
first three partitions of an MSX harddisk with Extended partition table.
So the pointer in the fourth table is not recognised... (it seems).
>>What they do is: in sector 0 of the harddisk there are 2 * 32 bytes of
>
> info;
>
>>the first holding data about partition 1, the second being a pointer to
>>another sector. In this sector there are 2 * 32 bytes of info; the first
>>holding data about partition 2, the second being a pointer to another
>>sector. In this sector there are 2 * 32 ...(reiterate until you get to
>>partition 32. If I remember correctly that 32 partitions was the maximum -
>>anyway, it's an arbitrary limit.)
Yes, 32 is the maximum (which I have on my 1GB disk... ;-)
It's not a big deal, since it's not that useful to have >1GB harddisks
on MSX, but I'm still surprised you limited it... Or is this really
necessary?
>>(I thought that this format was PC compatible. I now don't really think it
>>is, because the PC only does a pointer to another sector once. It may be
>>compatible depending on how the particular PC's BIOS is implemented,
>>perhaps, maybe, kind of, idunno...)
See above: it doesn't even seem to work with the first pointer.
>>So in NFDISK 1.1/2 I added the 'BERT/HPN' format. (There must be a very
>>small utility around -on some Quasar disk anyway- that converts Extended
>>to/from BERT format. If someone knows this by any chance, please tell me -
>>because there may be documentation included that proves whether I'm
>
> talking
>
>>nonsense here or not.)
It's attached. The file is also here:
http://www.funet.fi/pub/msx/utils/harddisk/novaxtab.pma
Sorry for posting it on the newsgroup, I'm too lazy to make seperate
posts. It's probably filtered out on the mailinglist... :-)
>>I don't know if I have all details right. I may have mixed up something in
>>Extended vs. BERT and in old MSX / MAK 3.0... But this is about it, kind
>
> of.
Well, I really hope that you can get that documentation and sources! :-)
It's good to konw if it's exactly right or not.
>>Sooooo.... that's it. Questions:
>>- what more do you need to know?
Probably more something for Jurgen (but he's in the Cc: list), but:
- I have a (beta) Novaxis 1.59.64 BIOS. What's the difference with
version 1.51?
- I know that BIOS 1.00 cannot handle extended partitions. Any other
incompatibilities between other versions? ANd which other versions were
released anyway?
Some other things:
- Since these compatibility problems with PC exist, what would be the
best way to backup my MSX harddisk (with a pc) to cd, according to you?
- Marcel Delorme made another versoin of the Novaxis BIOS: he unrolled
all loops which gave about 30% increase of speed. Cool isn't it? ;-)
>>- how did you guys come to this? Are you planning something? What's UZIX?
SEveral things:
- We want to keep all those docs and sources for the future in a central
archive, so that 'new' people can still make use of them and develop
software for our hardware
- An example is Uzix. All info is on http://uzix.msx.org/ (and it
RULES!) Adriano is making a Novaxis driver for Uzix.
>>This weekend, I'll try to find NFDISK sources and put them on my
>
> homepage...
Great! :-)
>>I think I remember having lost v1.2 but still having 1.1...
What are the differences?
--
Grtjs, Manuel
PS: MSX 4EVER! (Questions? See http://www.faq.msxnet.org/)
PPS: Visit my homepage: http://bilderbeek.cjb.net/
--
For info, see http://www.stack.nl/~wynke/MSX/listinfo.html
