Hi Arkady! I think it is at most a very small bug if the boot sector "falls off the end of the root directory" if it has no entry which starts with 00 at the end. As long as the KERNEL does not have such a bug... (checks for end-of-chain in FAT32 or root dir size in FAT1x case before trying to use the "next" entry when there is none...).
Why should clusters 0 / 1 be treated as end-of-chain? I would say they are technically simply "invalid", so you have to end the chain there, but the same can be said for "cluster number bigger than max. cluster number on THIS drive". Testing for all cases is probably too complex for the boot sector, but the KERNEL should have such tests. > - directory sectors was searched from the end. Why is this a bug? > - next_cluster: top 4 bits now are not masked. They should - the top 4 bits in FAT32 are "reserved" (I think tools like defrag could use them to store flags in the RAM copy of the FAT - I never saw nonzero values for those bits on DISK). > - FAT sector# and offset is now calculated in next_cluster by division. Is this safe? In WinXP/ME, FAT32 FATs can be > 64k sectors big. In Win9x each FAT can be only 16 MB, though. For FAT1x it should be safe, indeed. > PS: Who selects segment 1FE0h for boot code relocation? Why not 3000h? With Ancient tradition. Old FAT1x boot sectors were written with an 128k RAM limit in mind, although, as you notice: > 1FE0:7C00=158k. BTW, take a look at comments in (current) boot32.asm - > they are misleading, because says "1FE0:0" for boot sector. ... I hope that at least the boot32lb / boot32ea boot sectors have correct comments? I think 126k maximum kernel size is no problem at all, and MetaKern / metaboot relies on the 1fe0:7c00 location AFAIR. About the bonus problem "how do I suppress boot messages": Well... just close your eyes. Or recompile the kernel with a "mute" InitDisk and welcome message. But even they, you would NOT want to remove the license info text! So mute booting is for Windows weenies who refuse to allow an operating system to have any complexity. Again, just IGNORE the message. Do not try to remove it. In autoexec you can redirect or ctty everything to NUL, but you cannot do that in config,sys! You could misuse the SCREEN=... command to enter a screen mode with a tiny font, though - even in config,sys ;-). Eric. ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net is sponsored by: Speed Start Your Linux Apps Now. Build and deploy apps & Web services for Linux with a free DVD software kit from IBM. Click Now! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1356&alloc_id=3438&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-kernel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-kernel
