> Are you sure about the non 512 byte sector support? > The fake RAM disk that I show when a NetDrive drive letter is not connected > uses four 64 byte sectors and FreeDOS can read it just fine. FreeDOS Chkdsk > is > limited to only working on 512 byte sector devices, but normal reads from the > RAM disk work.
It is possible that FreeDOS will work with sector sizes less than 512 bytes, but your particular scenario of a _disconnected_ "NetDrive" (which I assume is a drive attached through a network of some sort) is an apples to oranges (or cheese to chalk) comparison. Obviously, reads and writes to a disconnected drive won't work. When removable drives like floppies and network-attached drives are disconnected, what shows up in the various DOS internal tables that keep track of the drives can in no way be trusted. For example, in MS-DOS and PC-DOS what shows up in the tables for floppies that have never been accessed is a "fake" entry that shows itself as a 46 MB FAT12 disk. In DR-DOS it shows as a regular 1.44 MB FAT12 disk. In FreDOS all the table entries are 0 which means "nothing" (does that mean FreeDOS is compatible with 0-byte sectors?). Only after the disk is accessed do things show up correctly. You can use my DRIVES program which is included with the USB drivers to look at some of those things (I wrote it to help me write and troubleshoot the USBDRIVE program). When it comes to remote/foreign disks, though, including network drives and optical media like CD's, I haven't experimented enough to know what shows up in the various internal DOS tables to say anything definitive. But I know that a lot of the things that show up in the internal DOS tables must be fake since DOS doesn't really need to know much about the physical disk parameters, or even if the remote disk has "sectors" (at least in the commonly understood sense of the term). For example, in the case of a RAID setup or a Storage Area Network (SAN) only certain parts of what shows up in the internal DOS tables may correspond to anything "real" at all. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
