dosread.c again

Ronald Khoo ronald at ibmpcug.co.uk
Sat Oct 14 18:27:20 AEST 1989


[about reading/writing messDOS floppies formatted under Xenix]

In article <3717 at ast.cs.vu.nl> ast at cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:
> Here is a (hopefully) improved version of dos/read/write.dir.  Could DOS
> users please try it on floppies, HD, 12-bit FAT, 16-bit FAT etc and post
> the findings.  The idea is to get a version of this program that works
> on all current versions of DOS.

Hi Andy...  I'm not a messDOS user, but since Xenix is another
macrohard product, I thought that would almost count :-)

So here are my results running your dosdir under SCO Xenix 2.3.1 with a
floppy formatted under the same OS.

After linking /dev/dsk/f0q15dt to /dev/dosX, I get:

/tmp/dosdir X

OEM = SCO BOOT
Bytes/sector = 512
Sectors/cluster = 1
Number of Reserved Clusters = 1
Number of FAT's = 2
Number of root-directory entries = 224
Total sectors in logical volume = 2400
Media descriptor = 0xf9
Number of sectors/FAT = 7
Sectors/track = 15
Number of heads = 2
Number of hidden sectors = 0
Bootblock magic number = 0x0000
magic != 0xAA55
Can't handle disk

Interesting that this has never stopped me using floppies formatted under
SCO Xenix before.  Is dos{read,write,dir) the only program in the world
that checks the magic number?  Interessant....  The rest of the stuff
looks approximately reasonable to me, let me take out the sanity check,
hang on.. OK it's got no files, let me put a couple on.. hmmm.. seems to work.
Does your /dev/dos? do something that my /dev/dsk/f0q15dt doesnt?  Seems
unlikely somehow...

Does this prove anything ?
-- 
Ronald.Khoo at ibmpcug.CO.UK (The IBM PC User Group, PO Box 360, Harrow HA1 4LQ)
Path: ...!ukc!slxsys!ibmpcug!ronald Phone: +44-1-863 1191 Fax: +44-1-863 6095
$Header: /users/ronald/.signature,v 1.1 89/09/03 23:36:16 ronald Exp $ :-)



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