Hi, On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 3:43 AM Deposite Pirate <dpir...@metalpunks.info> wrote: > > I have a bunch of SATA mechanical hard drives with perfect health that I've > swapped out for SSDs in various laptops. > I installed a 160Gb one with a Silicon Image 3512a SATALink host controller > in my IBM Aptiva E30-2137 > (ALi M1531 Aladdin IV chipset). So far it seems to works great with Windows > NT 4. No limitation problems. > I use this machine with CF cards to run various OSes (among which FreeDOS, > DR-DOS). > I thought to myself it would be awesome to format the drive as FAT32 and > share it with FreeDOS and DR-DOS. > Unfortunately this SiI 3512a only has Windows drivers and it doesn't look > like the firmware of this card does any BIOS > magic to make it available to DOS. Considering how late FAT32 support came to > the DOS family of OSes I would > understand why no manufacturer of SATA add-on host controller bothered with > DOS support. So I am wondering if > there is actually such a thing as an add-on SATA host controller that can be > used from DOS OSes.
This advice may be redundant (and is secondary): Be careful to know which OS you want to use actually has support for FAT32. You probably already knew that, but just to reiterate, many older OSes do not! It might be better to have both FAT16 and FAT32 partitions, for maximum compatibility. (Although I find FAT16 greater than 500 MB wasteful in slack space. Caveat emptor.) NT 4 didn't support FAT32, that came later with Windows 2000 (2k). Similarly, DR-DOS 7.03 had no LBA nor FAT32 support. (There may be some support in unofficial OEM releases, e.g. 7.06 or 7.08 or whatever they were called, but those were very incomplete and not "full" installs, by any stretch. Or maybe you meant EDR-DOS? 2005 stable or 2011 unstable probably mostly support it.) MS-DOS proper didn't get it until, what, Win95 OSR2 ?? Of course, FreeDOS supports FAT32 just fine, assuming you didn't get a botched kernel build somewhere. (The FAT16-only kernel only saves about 2 kb, IIRC, so not really worth it.) FreeDOS doesn't support the weird "4 GB file" kludge of later Windows (98??) using int 21h, 716Ch or whatever. (DJGPP 2.04 or newer should "probably" have that support. Heck, DJGPP also has some hardcoded "version 7" routines, hence CoreUtils "df -h ." won't support FAT32 if detecting "version 6" or similar.) This is fairly rare and not worth missing (much, if at all, IMHO). Just FYI. Corrections welcome, and sorry if this is obvious or not a direct answer. (FreeDOS is great!) _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
