Re: MORE on flopticals and their ilk

[paw@bbs.ausom.oz.au (Peter Watson)]

khym@wixer.bga.com (Dave Huang) asks:

>BTW, can someone from Apple tell me how the MSDOS FST checks to see if
>a disk is in MSDOS format (if it's not too complicated :-)? MSDOS
>disks that I make with "mformat" aren't recognized by the FST, but
>real MSDOS disks formatted on an IBM work great. Is it the lack of a
>real boot block?
>--
>Dave Huang
>khym@wixer.bga.com

The MSDOS boot block doesn't actually have to have boot code in it, but it
does have to contain the BIOS Parameter Block at the start of the block (a
bit beyond the scope of here), and it must contain $55 $AA as the last two
bytes in the block. The first byte should be $E9 or $EB. The reason the BPB
must be there is that it contains details such as the cluster size, the FAT
size, etc.

I haven't seen the mtools package, but I _have_ written an entire suite
of MSDOS utilities that read, WRITE, format, etc. The disks that are created
are quite happily recognized by the MSDOS FST, and for that matter are given
the OK by Norton's Utilities on a PC! They even handle partitioned drives,
such as SyQuest cartridges, that Apple's FST can't!

These utilities will be available in the next few days - depending on the
arrival of C 2.0.1 with a library bug fix! They are shell utilities written
under the ORCA shell, but they should function under GNO 1.1 (1.0 tends to
have the display messed up). In any case, I intend to include a mini-shell
for those people who don't own a shell. Nothing fancy, but it works. :-)
-- 
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