Scott, I am the author of the UIDE driver for DOS systems. Eric Auer is away from E-Mail, for a few days, so I will reply directly to your thread about "Large drives with 4K sectors" --
First, DOS formatting programs are in effect "stand alone" utility programs, that can pretty-much do what they like when formatting a hard-disk. Easy for them to format 512-byte sectors, 4K sectors, or whatever. But -- Second, file I-O done by other DOS programs uses either 24-bit CHS requests (up through V6.22 MS-DOS) or 48-bit LBA requests (all new DOS variants including FreeDOS). The two I-O request schemes are designed for 512-byte sectors only. Thus, any program that wants to do file I-O using new 4K-byte sectors will need MAJOR additions in the DOS kernel to handle such I-O requests. This "Ain't gonna happen!", as some might say in the U.S.A. Third, although a 48-bit disk logical-block address (LBA) could be specified, DOS systems have not-yet gone beyond using more than 32 bits of "block count" (i.e. sectors) in a disk directory, limiting DOS files (and disks!) to 2-TB maximum. More than that will also require MAJOR changes to the DOS kernel, and I believe this "Ain't gonna happen, neither"! DOS systems, excepting FreeDOS and maybe EDR-DOS, are NOT under current maintenance, and any kernel changes to most DOS variants are now only a "dream"! If you desire to use a DOS system, I suggest you "Think only 2-GB" drives, maximum. If your system really NEEDS more than 2-GB, you may want to consider reserving 2 or more "partitions" on the disk, the first of which is limited to 2-GB for use with DOS. I am not a file-systems expert, so others shall have to tell you if DOS can allow MORE than one 2-GB partition on the SAME disk. I doubt it! Since my own UIDE driver must handle all variants of DOS including all "old" ones, I have NO plans to update UIDE specifically for 4K sectors. If "new" 4K-sector disks can still be handled via "old" 512-byte DOS I-O requests, I shall leave UIDE "as is". UIDE thus needs no changes to go above 2-TB, since it does issue all 48 bits of disk LBA address for any hard-disk read or write command. Jack Ellis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Xperia(TM) PLAY It's a major breakthrough. An authentic gaming smartphone on the nation's most reliable network. And it wants your games. http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-sfdev _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
