On Wed, 31 Jan 2024 at 09:10, Thomas Cornelius Desi via Freedos-user <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > Does anyone around know if BIOSes in general differentiate between »floppy > drive« or »hard disk« because of an existing MBR (or partition table) or not?
Interesting question. Some (older) BIOSes do distinguish between USB hard disk, USB floppy, and USB optical drive. In normal DOS usage, floppies have no partition table, as I understand it. The raw disk device has a filesystem. Hard disks must have a partition table first, and the classic DOS MBR means 4 primaries max, 1 of which can be an extended holding logical drives. I don't _think_ BIOSes decide on the basis of format; the device detection stuff happens first. Maybe on size? Superfloppies got up to about 120MB. I don't recall much bigger. SCSI lets devices report if they are removable or not. I don't know if USB does. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven IoM: (+44) 7624 277612: UK: (+44) 7939-087884 Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
