Hi Michael, > 1) If FreeDOS can boot from some 'unusual' device such as USB harddisk > or SATA hardisk then FreeDOS will access the disk with BIOS calls > anyway. No extra drivers needed.
Correct. The BIOS drivers for USB can be slow, in particular for writing, and they might conflict with other, non-BIOS USB drivers, but there are even BIOSes which can boot from USB 2 storage (stick, disk, floppy, cd, dvd...) at normal speed :-) > For any application there is NO difference compared to boot from > internal IDE? Therefore all applications should work perfect like > booted from IDE? There are question marks, so I assume you mean "is there a difference? Will all applications work?" ;-) The answer is that apps which use the kernel will work fine, apps which use the BIOS (for example fdisk) might be more or less compatible than the kernel itself. But that is their fault, not the fault of the BIOS... See the fdisk SCSI/SATA and LBA detection troubles :-p. There are almost no apps that use the disk without BIOS. Maybe Ontrack / EzDrive / SMART checkers / benchmark tools / UDMA drivers ;-). > 2) What about FAT32 or DOSLFN? Do some applications dislike > it? (apart from error scanning, partitionizing) Some apps can accidentally "see" the LFN fragments when they try to get a list of short file names in a directory, but I think that even happens if no DOSLFN is loaded... Windows and other "heavily lowlevel" apps may try to use the disk directly and have other limits than the kernel, for example they may lack LBA or FAT32 support. You can often switch those to a compatibility mode as workaround. Everything that works on "more raw than files" level will have to understand FAT32 and LBA itself. Examples are the fips partition resizer, partitioning, formatting, defrag, disk checking, compressed file systems, "mount ext2fs or ntfs drive" style drivers and so on. Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
