Hi Liam and Exilas,
> Use the DRIVPARM command in CONFIG.SYS to inform the OS of the real > drive type and parameters? Both DRIVPARM and DRIVER are related to situations where the BIOS e.g. fails to report correct (typically floppy) drive properties. At this used to be only relevant for really ancient hardware, FreeDOS does not yet support either of the two. In situations where you add drives by adding driveRs, you need neither, so for example USB drives and CD/DVD drives are not affected by this missing feature of FreeDOS :-) Of course Exilas may seem to be in a situation where the drive and the BIOS mismatch, as Exilas' drive is a physical 360k one without ability to use 1.2M disks, while the BIOS does not know anything older than 1.2M drives, so some messing with internal BIOS or DOS settings might be in order, exception proving the rule ;-) I would not go as far as suggesting to use a DOS with DRIVPARM or DRIVER either, though. Those have not received any useful updates in the last 30 years and may not help much now. I think Exilas has gotten SOME reactions from the drive, so the TESTCFG output that no controller, interrupt or drive exists is more likely related to a boot setting conflict than to not being able to use the drive at all? Note that you can sometimes tell the BIOS to seek the floppy head at boot, which may result in failing to find an 80 track drive (because 360k drives have only 40 tracks) which could give the BIOS the impression that no drive exists at all, in context of the BIOS being unaware that drive variants with less than 80 tracks exist at all. So I suggest to configure the BIOS to not do the seek test. Then it can stick to the belief of having an 1.2M drive until you can load something in DOS which knows better than that. Maybe VGACOPY can be told that the drive is a 360k one in spite of the BIOS or CMOS data falsely saying otherwise? Low level ideas for changing the drive type: The CMOS data, address 10h, would be 20h for "A: 1.2 MB, B: not installed", you could change it to 10h for "A: 360k, B: not installed" and hope the BIOS does not realize knowing nothing about 360k drives either way. Not sure which tools would be easy to use for CMOS edits (you also have to fix checksums etc.) but maybe somebody here can recommend some. The FreeDOS kernel and some disk apps will probably use int 13h, function 8 to get drive info. Among other things, this will return the 2 (1.2M) or 1 (360k) from the CMOS, as well as the geometry (40 or 80 tracks, 1, 2 or more heads etc.) which in theory gives you the chance to modify values. But in practice, you would have to do that before booting DOS. After booting DOS, you can use int 13h, function 17h to pick "360k in 360k", "360k in 1.2M", "1.2M in 1.2M" or "720k in 720k or 1.44M" drive modes, which gives you the chance to finally push the BIOS to accept the drive being 360k, not just the disk. DOS itself also tracks some drive properties. However, almost everything will use the BIOS to access the floppy and given that the BIOS does not list 360k drives as something it knows to exist, support could be very limited even if you try to help it by tuning some status variables. Which is why VGACOPY, with suitable overrides in the config of VGACOPY, might be something which can help you more! :-) Note that controllers which support 2.88M drives probably do not support 360k floppy drives, but I fail to see what makes those special, so maybe it is only SOFTWARE which needs to know whether you have 40 or 80 hardware tracks, so it can skip every other track for 360k disks in 1.2M drives. Software is easier to work around. The easiest solution would probably be that you get an 1.2M drive given that your mainboard supports those natively :-) Or of course one of the more widespread 1.44M drives. Various tasks can also be solved using virtual floppy drives, which only exist in software. Some retrocomputing people also use microcontroller devices which have a SD card socket and some floppy or IDE connector, simulating drives of your choice, but I think there are few situations where those are nice? Other people here can probably recommend some products :-) Regards, Eric PS: See RBIL port info for ports 3F0 to 3F7 for those who enjoy reading about the low level floppy controller magic. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
