This gets interesting....
A person a work was just given a new laptop running Win2000
by support staff. He inserted a ZIP disk from his old NT laptop
and it destroyed the Win2k machine. {would not even boot again}
Seems something in the ZIP cheating scheme is not kosher...
watermodem
Riley Williams wrote:
> Hi Manfred.
>
> >>>> Another point to add is that some (newer?) ZIP drives have
> >>>> a jumper on them which enables some cheat mode for MSDOS
> >>>> which actually hides some sectors from the device driver.
>
> > Both WinNT and Windows 95 need the cheat mode: IIRC they
> > don't analyze the partition table if the device reports
> > itself as ATAPI FLOPPY.
>
> >>>> That is, block 0 on the drive actually moves along with the
> >>>> partition table, and perhaps also the reported capacity.
>
> > Fixed 32 blocks, they don't analyze the partition table.
>
> >> Load first sector. Is it an MBR/partition table, or a boot
> >> sector? If the former, add an offset of 32 sectors to all
> >> subsequent accesses. This way, we get consistent behaviour
> >> from both types of drive. You then always mount /dev/sda
> >> (or whatever).
>
> > What if you have a partition table with != 32 sectors?
>
> As far as MSDOS and Windoze is concerned, the partition table is
> ONE sector in length - it consists of offsets 447 to 510 of the
> first sector of the disk, with offsets 0 to 446 comprising the
> Master Boot Record and offsets 511 to 512 being the boot block
> signature.
>
> The reason for the 32 sector offset to the start of the partition
> on zip disks is because DOS and Windoze require the partition to
> start on a track boundary - zipdisks declare 32 sectors per
> track. Software such as PartitionMagic and the like take
> advantage of this by storing their boot code in those otherwise
> unused sectors.
>
> > Just try to mount an hfs formatted disk, the length of the
> > partition table depends on the version of the formatter :-(
>
> I don't know HFS so can't comment thereon...
>
> > But it possible to disable this mode with some special
> > ATAPI commands, IIRC my brother told me that he send them
> > to a linux developer a few months ago.
>
> If it is, that'd certainly be the best choice.
>
> Best wishes from Riley.
>
> * Copyright (C) 2000, Memory Alpha Systems.
> * All rights and wrongs reserved.
>
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
> | There is something frustrating about the quality and speed of Linux |
> | development, ie., the quality is too high and the speed is too high, |
> | in other words, I can implement this XXXX feature, but I bet someone |
> | else has already done so and is just about to release their patch. |
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
> * http://www.memalpha.cx/Linux/Kernel/
>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 23 2000 - 21:00:22 EST