RE: VFAT.XFS

[Mike lamb <mike@ciren.co.uk>]

At 13:22 26/08/97 +0100, Petr Stehlik wrote:
>On Tue, 26 Aug 1997, Mike lamb wrote:
>
>> What was this talk of BigDOS not working with MiNT? I have been running
>> BigDOS with MiNT for some time and have no problems at all in reading and
>> writing Win95 formatted Syquest cartiridges. I don't think that they're
>
>if BigDOS works with MiNT on some systems, it's great news. However on my 
>system it doesn't even boot (it crashes). Also, the current Falcon 
>version of BigDOS (0.8) destroys second FAT regularly. BigDOS's author knows 
>about it, but that's all. BTW I still wonder how you managed to run 
>BigDOS with MiNT, since BigDOS replaces whole GEMDOS and patches 
>important calls like Pexec! I still can't believe these two systems (MiNT 
>and BigDOS) can cooperate together...
>
>Tell us, please, what AUTO programs you use and how they're arranged.


I had no idea it was still supported. I found it on an old ST Applications
disk and though i'd try it. I don't know what version it is, but it seems to
work ok.

I run it first in the AUTO folder. I don't think there's anything else
that's relevant - Geneva 006, a couple of TSRs that catch the reset vector
and the system beep, but they shouldn't change much...

Thinking about it that should work with all XFS: Any partitions that MiNT
has to deal with (like Minix partitions) MiNT catches the exception for and
handles, but any exceptions that refer to partitions MiNT doesn't know about
or doesn't care about (like TOS partitions) are passed through to the TOS
handler, aren't they?

If that TOS handler was caught by BigDOS then that happens outside what MiNT
cares about.

How difficult would it be to add a bit to BigDOS (assuming it can be made to
work with MiNT) to read and write FAT16? From what people have said, FAT32
is a bit more tricky, but I thought that FAT16 would be a bit easier. It
wouldn't be an ideal, clean solution but it could work, which is what really
counts.

>> have heard rumours that fat32 does more than that, but I can't imagine that
>> Microsoft have completely rewritten the filesystem structure and lost the
>> compatibility with DOS that they've kept for 15-odd years...
>
>FAT32 is simply 32-bit FAT? The structure is the same, but no software 
>ever counted on 32-bit FAT, so it's actually incompatible :-) (this is my 
>impression only, I don't know much about VFAT32).

Mike Lamb