Hi, I have some wishes for SYS and kernel (and DOSFSCK)...: - MS completely ignores the FAT1x root directory size if the FAT1x sectors per FAT is 0 (which marks the drive as FAT32). Even SCANDISK is happy! So I suggest to modify DOSFSCK: If the value is not 0, show a warning BUT ignore the value. Current DOSFSCK tries to interpret the situation as "there is a FAT1x root directory between the FAT32 FAT and the data clusters" which gets really messy.
(At least DOSFSCK does show a warning already) - InitDisk should only use LBA values if CHS-in-partition-table and LBA-in-partition-table-converted-to-CHS-using-geometry-from-BIOS mismatch. The warning (already exists) should tell the user that CHS values are ignored because of the mismatch and (!) it should tell the user what the geometry according to the BIOS is. The warning should also tell whether it is the start or the end of the partition which caused the warning. MS seems to ignore CHS completely at least for FAT32, so the CHS mismatch warning should sound a bit more harmless than it does now. - A professional reaction to CHS / LBA mismatch would be checking which of the 3 possible places (LBA, CHS-in-partition-table and LBA-in-partition- table-converted-to-CHS-using-geometry-from-BIOS) contains a valid 55 aa marked boot sector. I do not expect that anything except LBA will be correct in case of a mismatch, but better be safe. - SYS should have a magic drive letter which would mean "take all data from the boot sector file and write resulting boot sector back to the file without truncating it". Physical geometry / hidden sector count will have to be taken from the file in that case too. The result would be a SYS which can add FreeDOS boot sectors to disk images, or turn arbitrary DOS boot sector files into FreeDOS boot sectors. This would only be used in BOOTONLY case (copying files to diskimages is better done by other programs). The magic drive letter could be something like "$:" or "Z:" ... - SYS should be able to force the FAT1x root directory entry count to zero if the FAT1x sectors per FAT value is 0 (which marks FAT32) and the cluster number of the FAT32 root directory is valid. That way it can normalize strange boot sectors. - SYS should have an option to set the drive number in the boot sector to 0x80 instead of 0xff (which means "take from DL from BIOS at boot time"). Some tools might expect a value of 0x80 at bootsector[0x40] for harddisks, although this is less flexible than FreeDOS style. Windows uses 0x80 for all harddisks, no matter what actual BIOS drive number they have (this is normal - you are only going to boot from it when it is 0x80 anyway... well, unless Windows could do "take from DL from BIOS", of course ;-)). - boot sectors could be made to show a generic error message like "Error" instead of hanging, now that Arkady has squeezed some more free space out of them :-). However, FAT1x and FAT32-CHS boot sectors should stay 8086 compatible if possible. - DOSFSCK should have a non-interactive "scan only but change nothing" mode - DEBUG with FAT32 support should come out of that hidden corner. I have seen the patches and they worked. Only the announcement is missing (you will only be able to edit the first 32 MB of any FATxx partition with that DEBUG). - I sure forgot many useful suggestions X-). PS: Bug in the MetaKern documentation on beta9rc4: meta-all,sys and meta-all.bin are used inconsistently. If you are not careful, you will copy /b a non-existing file and MS copy /b would not even show a warning :-(. 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
