Hi Michael,
as you say WinXP sees the controller but can not format, can it at least read existing floppies? Will the drive spin up when XP tries to access it? About your project to connect either an ISA floppy controller or directly a classic floppy drive without a controller (I am not sure which method you imply) to a generic digital I/O card the BIOSes of various virtual machines etc. are written in C, so you could look in that direction and patch the port I/O to the controller into suitable I/O card accesses to write some custom "BIOS" which you can load as TSR in DOS on hardware :-) I suggest to start without DMA and just use PIO with classic string I/O Assembly operations or even pure C language I/O to keep things simple while developing. Or maybe I have misunderstood you and the "digital research multi I/O card" is what the BIOS of your old computer WANTS to use for floppy access? Then I wonder why it does not work? To debug DMA overrun while formatting, you could actually do the suitable calls by hand in debug and make sure that none of the buffers crosses a multiple of 64k linear address wise but remember that FORMAT already is supposed to make sure to do that automatically since May 2003. Which version do you use and which errorlevel and exact error message does it get with the /D option for debugging? Do other /f:size values work? Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
