PC XT under 86Box with XTIDE, mkfat refuses to format, needs reboot

[bastetfurry]

Description

• What is expected ?

mkfat formating the harddisk partition as outlaid in the wiki.

• What is observed ?

Failing with: (Had to manually type this, no copy_n_paste from the emulator)
bioshd: sector 0 access beyond partition (-1,0)
bioshd: I/O read error dev 0301 lba sector 0

Works after a reboot.

Configuration

• Version (commit or release): Release v0.8.1
• Emulator or HW platform: Emulator, 86Box v5.0

How to reproduce ?

• List the steps to reproduce the problem.

PX XT with 7.16 MHz, 640 KB, installed FPU, CGA, PC/XT FDC, PC/XT XTIDE, 3½" 720k, 5¼" 360k, 255 MByte HDD image (your average CF card you would use in an XT)

So someone with write access to the wiki should add that one needs to reboot the system after doing the fdisk dance.

[bastetfurry]

And sys just crashed the system... if someone wants to dig trough this, i attached my config file for 86Box.

XT.cfg.txt

[ghaerr]

I'm not really sure if you're saying that mkfat worked, but then required a reboot and is not documented, or whether mkfat failed and did not work. I have also heard of some problems with ELKS running on 86Box, there may be a compatibility issue. I don't have 86Box available on my macOS laptop to further test, I am sorry.

The screenshot seems to show a write-protected device, was it just these three errors or did that occur for many sectors?

It might be worth running a much later version than v0.8.1, which is over a year old - there has been much done on the system since then. Images can be downloaded from any commit, available automatically by GitHub CI.

I can help with more debugging information if a photo is provided of the boot screen, as well as exactly when mkfat or fdisk is failing.

[bastetfurry]

I will try a newer version then first, if that too fails i will write down every step. Or better yet, if you have the time, we make a video call and i share my screen. :)

[bastetfurry]

After a bit of fiddling i got it to at least segfault and not outright crash on me. ^^'

Using 784c7a0 i partitioned and formated the drive, with a reboot in between and this time not inserting the floppy in write protect, called for sys to do its thing and:

But if you say that 86Box isn't working that good anyway i'll give qemu a shot, at least for installation. My original Tandy 1000, the only XT class machine i have, is in storage currently and doesn't have the full 640k anyway and my only other option for somewhat real XT class hardware is an Amiga 500 with a "Bridgeboard", a card with a V20 and some support chips on there so that the Amiga can run PC stuff.

[ghaerr]

Thanks for the update @bastetfurry. It seems that there is no problem with mkfat nor fdisk after reboot, but yes, we can see a serious problem with the sys shell script getting a stack underflow.

Not sure yet whether that's in the shell the /bin/sys script, or whether that's in the cp command while copying files.

Add set -e to /bin/sys would allow us to better debug that. If you could try running the entire installation (again) with QEMU that would be great! We can then figure out what is causing your problems - from what I am now seeing they should not be happening.

Thank you!