Hi Sparky, > is this [extending chkdsk to fat32] possible?
My answer is based on "CHKDSK works on all computers where DOS works and behaves as in old MS DOS times": Yes and no. To do proper checking, you want to have more memory available, so you want a 32 bit memory space. The DOS port of DOSFSCK from dosfstools does that... But you can do SOME of the checks of CHKDSK even if your RAM is much smaller than your FAT. As you know, for FAT32, each copy of the FAT can grow to 1 GigaByte in theory. Old Windows versions had troubles if the FAT was above 16 MB, I believe. So in any case, expect several megabytes. And you want to keep track of which clusters are lost or double- used (cross-linked) and by which files and so on :-) So you could have a look at the source code of both tools and think which features would work or not if you only have 640k of RAM. Of course you could work with reading FAT sectors again and again, to avoid having them in RAM: Even then, you would probably have to cache more than 640k of OTHER data in RAM, simply to figure out whether the filesystem is okay. Do some careful reading and share your thoughts here. Regards, Eric PS: Obviously you do NOT want to store temp data in swap files while checking a filesystem. If you only need to have the STYLE of CHKDSK, then you can patch the 32 bit DOSFSCK user interface, but I would not. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
