On 23 Apr 2002, at 16:27, Phoebus Dokos wrote: > Yep it works and the interesting part is that unfortunately he cannot test > it himself as his CF adapter has some problems which I hope he'll soon > solve either by a minor change or by a replacement (by me). > Talk about "SuperScalar" programming... It works even if you don't use the > device yourself! Well, all the kudos here must go to .... hell, I don't know, whoever is responsible for the Compact Flash reader behaving like a hard drive.
Actually, you just open a "winx_*d2d" file to the "hard disk" that is the compact flash reader. With one exception, it then behaves like a normal hard disk. So, to test this I just used another partition... The exception is that a compact disk stroes bytes within a word in teh wrong order. Normally, the first four bytes in a QL hard disk partition are "QLWA". Don't ask me what it means, I can undertand the "QL" part, but the rest... Well, anyway, on a compact flash, this would be "LQAW". Stupid, really. The software takes care of that. Oh, and whilst we're talking about partitions, there is a curious "feature" of partitions and accessing them via a "winx_*d2d" file on the Q60. Suppose you have a hard disk with 3 partitions (all 3 of them QL partitions of course, none of that Linux stuff :-) ) You would probably use something like: win_drive 1,0,0,0 win_drive 2,0,0,1 win_drive 3,0,0,2 to access the different partitions. You would then expect a "win3_*d2d" direct sector access file to open to the 3rd partition on the drive - not so, IT WILL OPEN to the very first sector of the physical disk (i.e. the partition table)- the same for win1_*d2d and win2_*d2d. It's not a problem, as long as you are aware of this. Wolfgang
