RE: VFAT.XFS versus MagiC

[Sven Karlsson <sven@it.lth.se>]

> AFAIK (I don't have any Atari docs here in work, so I may be wrong) Rwabs 
> can't read DOS sectors. You need something which work on physical layer, 
> maybe DMAread (but that doesn't work with IDE, most probably).

That's actually plain and simple wrong. ;-)

The hard disc driver (AHDI or whatever) does not interpret the data
on the disc at all. It just pass the information obtainded from the
controller that all is on the hard disc to
the application. Lowlevel formating is done by the controller in the
harddisc and it is thus hidden to anything (TOS/DOS/Linux whatever)
that's looking from the SCSI/IDE side. AHDI use normal SCSI/ISE
commands to access the disc just like DOS/Linux whatever do.

As for floppies the chips used in Ataris are compatible with the
corresponding pc ones and use the same type of lowlevel formatting.
(That's why you have a hard time reading Mac and Amiga discs that
haven't been msdos formatted..)

Regards
 Sven