> You could write such a driver but you have to remember that "DOS > block device" already implies FAT anyway.
This implication is a part of the problem I'm talking about. DOS (rather, the DOS device loader) shouldn't assume that just FAT exists (it also shouldn't discard non-FAT partitions from the MBR) but instead it should first provide any filesystem to all loaded redirectors so if one of the redirectors finds a non-FAT partition with a supported filesystem it could add this block device to it's devices. > In the ATAPI CD/DVD case, that interface is some > int2f and some "DOS character device" interface, nothing "block". Why do CD/DVD drivers need to have a DOS device visible to the DOS kernel at all, then? Actually, they don't. Pretending that it's a character device (which CD-ROMs usually aren't) is a hack (probably to save some memory compared to dumb PSP TSRs). If MS-DOS (3.x) had support for linking the redirector interface with block devices, CD/DVD drivers would probably be written as DOS block devices, reporting impossible values when asked for a (FAT-specific) BPB. (This won't require reading the CD-ROM.) The *CDEX redirector would then search unhandled block devices and provide access to those that access some sort of CDFS. A NTFS redirector would just search unhandled block devices for a device that accesses NTFS, instead of CDFS. The major problem seems that the redirector interface was designed for network redirectors, not for any kind of local non-FAT filesystem driver. Christian ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
