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Unleashing Useless Unnecessary UniPlus profile hard drive limits - (Untested)

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rayarachelian:

--- Quote from: compu_85 on March 07, 2021, 03:11:44 pm ---Sweet! Looking forward to trying this out!

FWIW, when I was running 2 Widgets on a 2/10 with Xenix, I could format the Widget attached to a parallel port card to 10m, but anything beyond the 5mb boundary went into nowhereland.

--- End quote ---

Yeah, not sure about Xenix, haven't disassembled it yet, however what uniplus does is a partition trick. the partition table has entries for both 5MB and 10MB drives and somehow the installer knows the size of the media and decides which partitions to use for root and swap. But if you use a corvus drive, it allocates the entire space to just root and swap.

Weird logic.

rayarachelian:
I think I know why the above failed. I only patched /unix (v1.4) on the boot floppy, however, there's another kernel on the floppy called /sunix that's v1.1 - and this guy is what runs the install script.

see: https://lisalist2.com/index.php/topic,52.msg1234.html#msg1234

rayarachelian:
So yeah, when I wrote this code I hadn't realized that "sunix" was a separate kernel (v1.1 vs v1.4) and as such it has it's own partition table that's identical. I didn't catch it the first time around because it's split across two different sectors. It should be available on the next push to unstable and separately libdc42, but likely it will need updates to the script that runs mkfs as well.

I've also added patches to LisaEm when a profile larger than 10MBs is used to modify the partition table in RAM. There's a slight issue here - since the partition table isn't stored anywhere, if you create a larger volume on an Aphid, X/ProFile, IDE::File and patch uniplus, the same parameters must be passed to LisaEm exactly for patching the image. I don't yet have a mechanism to do that, so was just making assumptions about the partition table, but I'll have to think up a mechanism for properly dealing with this.

i.e. if you install on real hardware, then use BLU to transfer to LisaEm (and convert to dc42). Likely the best way to go is to detect a patch and not to patch it when it's already patched. Obviously in this case if you have extra volumes, they all must be the same as as the large volume, or to be safe, just have a single large drive.

Many thanks for @compu_85 who provided a BLU image of a UniPlus install to play with, and also to jamesdenton for walking me through some of the details of how uniplus formats the ProFile and its setup script.

Don't yet have either v1.1 or v1.4 kernels booting all the way up, but I suspect it's around the BSY transitions not properly signalling interrupts. It's possible that Xenix is affected the same way.

I did add an option to fake 800k drives and both v1.1 and v1.4 report MicroDiskette with 2 heads. I also patched the keyboard ID cops code to only report to the Boot ROM, I don't see any ill effects from this in LOS so I'll leave it.

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