In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, ZN <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
The major part is more radical. It is high time that hard drive partitions
and formats be unified on QL platforms, and in fact, it is only Qubide that
does not directly conform to the norm. It should be possible (indeed, it
should not be much work) to convert the SMSQ/E win drivers for Qx0 to run
on Qubide hardware. The problem here is the lack of utilities. Qubide's
format and partition utilities are, to my knowledge, far more than is
available to the Qx0 user.
Adding a partition might be less useful than supporting large drives and leaving the separation down to Sub Directories. I say this thinking of the limitations on 8 devices.
8 devices, yes, that's the first limit. Then there is that 16 devices limit in the kernel tables...
at least, 8 devices limit is only: 8 mounted partitions at the same time. With a suitable partition program, big drives could be split in small slices, and a small PE utility which would allow to switch from the list of possible partitions to the list of actual mounted partition would make life easier in such configuration.
The biggest trouble so far is "big partition". I have seen trouble with the caching facility whenever the partition is big enough (and filled enough), probably a collision on the indexing mechanism. It was made for small removable drive (microdrive, ramdisk, floppies), not for a huge filesystem. Partition smaller than 128MB are safe. Bigger than 512MB are not...
Mind you that takes us back to the old Long Name argument. I must admit my views on that have changed over the last few years - since we last had the discussion and I feel that we should be prepared to make that major jump into new directory structure. It would leave many older programs out in the cold but I suppose you could, as you suggest, always use the partitions in different modes in the same way that windows will handle FAT32 and NTFS on the same machine. This would take someone far more competent than me to work out though and, as you say someone who can write that kind of driver code.
And then come the dreadful question: should we reinvent the wheel (... a filesystem) or adapt to an existing one (and which one ? and why ?)
Fat32 and NTFS fan beware: we are still going to run into the Motorola/Intel bytes ordering issue. Not a good thing at all.
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