Subject: Re: fsck and others die with Floating Point exception
To: None <macbsd-general@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Kevin Wilson 315-456-1404 <kevin@spef8.spef.syr.ge.com>
List: macbsd-general
Date: 03/10/1995 19:10:08
Excerpts From: Ken Nakata <kenn@romulus.rutgers.edu> and others.

   Strange... I do have a MacOS partition on each of my two drives, and
   never had a problem with that (I make the MacOS partitions certain
   sizes so that each BSD partition is nicely aligned at the cylinder
   boundary).

Just an observation, from the sounds of this and other notes going back as
much as a year, many of the people having problems with disk drives have
large drives (1.0 GB or more).
The two prevelent problems appear to be:
1) Too many partions (MacOS and/or others) comming before all the UNIX
partions.  (At the time it was explaned that only the first 8 partions
were examined to see if they were a partion of interest.)
2) From the recent comments, too large a partion comming before the UNIX
partions.

The point:  How does Net(Mac)BSD deal with partions?
If ..BSD reads a partion table then keeps track of where a partion is
via number of bytes from start of sector 0 and uses signed 32 bit
arithmetic, then ..BSD will get confused as soon as any part of an
access exceeds 2 GBytes.

My understanding is that SUN had to take steps to ensure that their
BSD based SunOS worked with 2 + GB disks.

What will happen when the cost of the 9 GB drives comes down to where
the average user can afford one.  That kind of capacity exceeds 32-bit
arithmetic.

Oh well, thanks for listening to my $0.02 worth, comments on these
observations welcome (like I have any choice:).

Kevin
kevin@spef8.spef.syr.ge.com