As I was designing USBDRIVE, I considered writing it as a straight ASPI driver (similar to the architecture of DIDD1000 or ASPIDISK), but decided against it for a multitude of reasons. The most important reason was the lack of freely available DOS ASPI support programs (e.g., to format or partition a disk). I also decided against a simple device driver approach, like Georg did, for similar reasons.
USBDRIVE provides a device driver, but also provides an INT 13h interface. There are lots of freely available DOS tools that will work with this type of architecture, since the USB disk appears to be a simple removable hard drive. DOS should have been natively supporting sectors other than 512 since the early 1980's, anyway. OTOH, an ASPI driver might make sense for USB CDs and DVDs instead of an MSCDEX-style driver approach, since ASPI allows for easy writing to disks instead of just reading. The standard MSCDEX-style drivers aren't set up for writing. My opinion, FWIW. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try before you buy = See our experts in action! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-dev2 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
