Nik Borton wrote:
> Since a hard drive is being simulated by plex86 anyway, it wouldn't be too
> difficult to overcome the FAT/NTFS system of writing to clusters anywhere on
> the disk; I imagine it's feasible with *nix-style filesystems, too. At least
> until reiserfs/ext3 et al become the norm.
>
> I submit two methods for consideration:
>
> 1) Assign clusters on a 'per-use' basis, in a consecutive fashion.
This was my initial idea yes.
> This would result in clusters being in the wrong order in the hardfile, but
> the guest would see the disk image in the correct manner. A plex86 host-side
> drive mapping bitmap would be necessary to keep track of it all.
> Neither method would work if true (or 'direct') simulation were implemented,
> since DOS/Windows require that the partition be formatted before use. Would
> it, therefore, be possible to trap the various methods used to format a
> cluster/sector, and just not do it (but return success, of course)? The
> FAT(s), or MFT, would still be written, etc, and so the guest would be
> unaware.
well, don't know what formatting *actually* writes to disk, but if you
found out that a sector is "empty" (contains 'zeros') I assume you could
throw that sector "away"/discard it (ofcourse the "default" when reading
a sector that has not be written to is to return a zero'ed buffer).
--
Best regards,
Jeroen Janssen
+++
"You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you
could
do is give them a meaningful look."
-- (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
+++
