Re: firmware for the PseudoDisk

["Alex Freed" <alexf@mirrow.com>]

"Andy McFadden" <fadden@fadden.com> wrote in message
news:455278da$0$34490$742ec2ed@news.sonic.net...
>
> Windows maps one physical partition and multiple logical partitions to
> drive letters.  The Windows partition map has space for 4 physical
partitions,

I think you are confusing a couple of things here.
The Windows partition map has space for 4 PRIMARY partitions.
Any primary partition's space in the partition table can be used by
an EXTENDED partitions list. There may be quite a few of them.

> only one of which is designated "active";

That's a boot partition.

> after that it's chaining "extended"
> and "logical" partitions around.

DOS and WINDOS can only use a single PRIMARY partition and
use a number of extended partitions for logical drives.

>
> The Mac version is the most generally elegant, but the
MicroDrive/FocusDrive
> formats are more compact and are better suited for the specific
application.

Mac compatibility is probably not a great concern.

>
> CiderPress will access every partition that can be found.  Not always in
> the most aesthetically pleasing manner, but it works. :-)

Teach me how to. When I try to open a physical device which is my
FAT-partitioned (out of the box) 128 MB SD card, CiderPress hangs.
It works fine with a 32MB card that has a ProDOS image.


> Presumably FAT32 would be employed for the larger volumes?

I'd rather use FAT16 with big clusters. Come to think of it the bigger
the better as I only need to store big images as files.

>
> Motivated individuals could use a defrag utility, and the code could
> fast-path to direct block read routines when files are contiguous, so
> whatever gains are to be achieved by side-stepping the filesystem are not
> necessarily lost.
>
> -- 
> Send mail to fadden@fadden.com (Andy McFadden) - http://www.fadden.com/
> Fight Internet Spam - http://spam.abuse.net/spam/ & http://spamcop.net/

-Alex.