Radical and foolish hardware experiments... HELP!

[Eisen Warren Thomas Day Guard.]

Ok, this weekend I spent with my 386, SCO Xenix, 71 meg miniscribe drive, 85
meg maxtor drive, an RLL controller card, and an MFM controller card.

A few things:

1) /usr/spool isn't mounted until *after* the system tries to find
/usr/spool/cron/crontabs, so cron aborts. I've started it by hand, so don't
fire up any more (unless it's died). What I want to know, is what are the other
files executed at startup, besides /etc/rc. I know init is fairly early and
seems to control spawning of gettys, but beyond that I don't know if there are
any text files that we can edit. Idealy, I'd like to put cron in after the
/etc/default/checklist checking command. As is, I'll put cron in /etc/rc and
live with the error messages.

2) We can't get full drive space unless I can mount one drive on the RLL
controller and the other on the MFM controller. My miniscribe works very poorly
on the RLL.. random errors appear constantly. What I'd like to know, is if
anyone has ever tested SCO's claim that 2 controller cards *are* supported
(this is said in the release notes. In the manual they deny this...). I suspect
I have to change the memory adresses of the cards, but I don't even think that
an AT will support 2 controllers. Give me reason to think it can be done before
I start to rip it apart again :)

3) Both the Maxtor and the Miniscribe are rated at 1024 cyls x 8 heads x 17
tracks. However, one clamis to be 71 meg, the other 85. An ideas? I don't have
any manuals for either, so there may be a possibility that the maxtor has more
heads/cyls. If anyone has a largish maxtor (sorry the model number is inside
the case and I don't want to rip it apart right now.. if you ask, I'll open it
though) can they let me know if they think my specs are wrong? It's an external
drive in a case about twice as long as it is high/wide (full height device). It
comes with it's own fan and power supply.

 Thanks for your attention.
-- 
                          "Knowledge once gained
                    casts a faint light beyond it's own
                           immediate boundaries"               - J.B.S. Haldane
Eisen D. Guard: eisen at contact.uucp  (Martin Loeffler)  "No Compromise  No Deal"