A/UX newfs and Sony Optical Disk Drive


Article Change History
----------------------
08/31/92 - REVIEWED
* For technical accuracy.


I have a private Sony SMO-C501-OO (Magneto-Optical disk). I did a newfs and
mounted it under A/UX. I've formatted it under SilverLining 5.25 with a
Slice 3 partition (287MB) under Macintosh OS. But when I created the newfs
on it under A/UX, the options were quite confusing. After several
unsuccessful attempts, I chose to recognize it as a 160SC disk, and then
the miracle occurs! The newfs command was working perfectly! So my
question is:

Is this normal? Does the newfs command recognize the hardware
specification of the disk and bypass the /etc/disktab or newfs options,
whatever your choice is?

The problem that you were getting with a smaller size of file system or
something confusing about the newfs options was possibly due to the wrong
type of disk drive you've chosen when creating the file system via "newfs".
We don't know what option(s) of "newfs" syntax you specified. We are not
sure if you have the right size of file system (with 287MB) after you chose
160SC disk type.

You should choose a drive type which is closer to your drive specification,
or you could create a new entry with the drive physical characteristics
(number of sectors/track, number of tracks/cylinder, and the number of
cylinders/disk) in /etc/disktab for the particular disk drive. "newfs"
reads the information from /dev/disktab for a particular drive type and
invokes the /etc/fs/ufs/mkfs program to make a file system for a partition.


Published Date: Feb 18, 2012