Re: apple II gs to ms-dos

["Russ Gibson" <russg@travsoft.com>]

Christopher D. Heer <cheer@i.hate.spam> wrote in article
<5cr15v$cp8@inet-nntp-gw-1.us.oracle.com>...
> In article <32E0FD07.6A65@monmouth.com>, dwebster@monmouth.com says...
> >I used to just pop MS-DOS disks into my GS HD drives, but the read only
> >DOS FST is not compatable with WIN 95 disks.  Even disks that were
> >formatted under DOS 6.22 or earlier, once read by a WIN 95 machine are
> >no longer readable by the GS.  Another interesting note, Mac PC exchange
> >(the sys 7.5xx version) also has a problem with WIN 95 disks.  It can
> >read the files, but the disk lable becomes a fragment of the name of the
> >most recently written file.  

<snip>
 
> I can't begin to imagine why this would be.  It's not as if the disk
format 
> changed (it didn't).  Could they be barfing because the creator ID in the
boot 
> record is unrecognised?
> 
> Doesn't make sense.  Anyone know what's up with this?

Yup - Win95 uses what is now called a VFAT.  To accomidate 255 character
filenames, it uses two names for every file:  the short atandard 8.3 name,
and the new up to 255 char name.  It stores these names as entries in the
directory, marked as hidden system.

BTW:  This was a real bonehead mistake on their part - when I worked on the
Laser 128 firmware we came up with much better solutions, and we were
limited to Apple II hardware!