To all the developers: Thank you for Kernel 2038!
I'm writing this because I came across two cases where programs didn't act the
same under FreeDOS as they do under other versions of DOS, but in fact FreeDOS
was running fine and there was no bug at all.
First non-bug: LFN-EN utilities don't work with my FAT32 partition under
FreeDOS.
After examining the source code, it turns out that the logic was coded in 1999
when
the only DOS that could handle FAT32 was MS-DOS. When run under FreeDOS, the
utilities
assume no FAT32 support, so they misidentify the partition as FAT12.
For test purposes, I made a version that accepted the vendor byte FD (FreeDOS)
instead of
FF (MS-DOS) and it worked, but anything used in production would have to use a
different
method to determine whether FAT32 is supported (FreeDOS comes both ways, and
there are several DOSses today that support FAT32.)
There is similar logic that determines which versions of DOS require volume
locking
(MS-DOS 7 or later.)
Fortunately the LFN-EN utilities are open source, so someone could fix this.
Second non-bug: Norton Disk Doctor only complains about illegal file names
when running
under FreeDOS.
It turns out that I had a file called MORE$, and my FreeDOS is set to run the
MORESYS
utility which turns MORE$ into a reserved device name (and therefore an illegal
file name if MORE$ exists on the disk) so no bug. If the MORESYS driver is not
loaded, Norton Disk Doctor acts identically under FreeDOS and MS-DOS.
(Note: I was not running FDAPM.)
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