Hi Jerome, >> You are welcome to buy me a new harddisk so I can test your >> 100 GB partitions of unspecified geometry,
> Wish I could. But, I’m on a budget. I was just trying to emphasize that it is more work for me to recreate your bug context than it would be for you to provide more details about your already existing bug platform ;-) If it would be really important, I could be able to ask somebody with plenty of empty disk space. >> So your bug is NOT a real bug. > Like I originally said... By design or a bug. No, you ASKED whether it was by design. To answer that question, I had to know more about the context. Now that I know that you used a FAT16 kernel, I can tell you that it is no bug to have no FAT32 support in it. But it is not by design either, because you could change your design and copy an 8086 FAT32 kernel onto the floppy distro boot floppy image. The design problem is that FDISK does not explicitly tell you that you are allowed to make FAT32 partitions but will not be able to use them if you stick to the kernel which you used to start FDISK... > I don’t think it would be good to start forking official kernels > with special builds. I am not talking about a fork. This is simply a less often used combination of compile time options: FAT32 on and 8086 compat on. Which is why you probably found no PREcompiled binary for it, but I am sure somebody can help you to find an 8086 binary with FAT32. Note that your compile is 4 years old, you should probably try a newer version anyway. Maybe Jeremy can say something about which version he recommends for 1.3 as being upgraded AND stable :-) > Overall, I think a better solution would be for the kernel team (PerditionC) > to > build the 8086 kernel with a comparable feature set to the 386 kernel where > possible. It is normal that the default 8086 compile is without FAT32: The 8086 has at most 640 kB RAM and you do not want to waste RAM for a feature which you do not need. Very few PC XT have 100 GB disk. It takes several kilobytes to support FAT32 and there are no HMA, XMS, UMB or EMS on most 8086 to compensate by relocating things. >> You should probably change the floppy distro to somehow prevent >> the user from creating FAT32 partitions if you decide to keep >> the current, FAT16-only kernel on the floppy distro. Thinking about this, you could make TWO boot floppies: One for 386 with FAT32 for people who simply have no CD/DVD writer or fail to do the tricks needed to open ISO files on harddisk. And one for the REAL 8086 users, with FAT16-only kernel and disabled FDISK FAT32. FDISK has many obscure command line options, so there probably are some which could achieve that ;-) Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
