RE: VFAT.XFS versus MagiC

[Jo Even Skarstein <Jo.Even.Skarstein@ifi.ntnu.no>]

On Mon, 25 Aug 1997, Petr Stehlik wrote:

> OK, but what we really need is the second point, reading and writting
> large medias. As you may (should :) know, TOS and DOS (or if you want MiNT
> and Windows) partitions are compatible if their size is 32 MB or less. For
> reading of bigger DOS partitions you need to use MagiC or BigDOS. And
> since MagiC nor BigDOS can run under MiNT, we need a third program (or a
> driver) which will allow us to read big MS-DOS partitions under MiNT.
> 
> Remember, that without this driver the VFAT or VFAT32 support is useless.
> And the other way round: someone will write a VFAT(32) filesystem when the
> big partitions can be read under MiNT, because then we will really need
> it. Writting XFS for diskettes it's really a wasting of time.

Adding VFAT-compatibility to the TOS fs should be quite easy, VFAT is
identical to FAT except for the extra entries in the FAT-table (For
the long filenames).

Forgive me if I'm not making sense here (I'm quite ignorant at this
field.), but a VFAT xfs shouldn't be harder to write than e.g. the
MinixFS xfs, unless the problem is that Rwabs() can't read all (or
none at all) sectors on "big" (>32Mb) DOS-partitions.

And before anybody asks me to make a VFAT-XFS; don't. Unlike e.g. 
Julian Reschke I don't have the skills to write such a complicated
thing :-( My only experience with reading/writing sectors directly was
a game-loader, and it jammed the head on the diskdrive on my first 520
;-)


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** Jo Even Skarstein    http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~josk/
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