One correction: on my XP machine using the CMD command interpreter,
whichfat reports every existing drive as FAT16. I guess that kinda makes
sense as it's the native format for DOS and I guess Windows converts file
formats before doing disk i/o.
Booting under DOS 6.22, whichfat reports FAT drive formats correctly and
reports NTFS drives as missing. I haven't tried 7.1 yet.
Bruce
On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 7:43 PM, bruce.bowman tds.net
<bruce.bow...@tds.net>wrote:
> My batch file seems to have two problems, one of which is that FreeDOS
> does not allow compound IFs and/or FOR nesting of any kind. I can work
> around that, but the second problem is the one that I'm really struggling
> with.
>
> Some background: When I boot up using my new CD, the floppy drive image is
> assigned drive A:. The CD itself is assigned drive Y:. My computer has one
> physical hard drive with two partitions, the first being NTFS and the
> second FAT32. The FAT32 partition gets assigned drive letter C: while NTFS
> does not get a drive letter (of course). I also load a USB driver which
> assigns my thumb drive with the letter E: So far, so good.
>
> So I'm trying to use some of the code below in a batch file to see which
> drives are present. Things go well until we try the following:
>
> IF EXIST D:\NUL ECHO Y
> Error reading from Drive D: DOS area: unknown command given to driver
>
> The same thing happens when I use WHICHFAT D:. I've read about similar
> problems happening using FreeDOS within DOSEMU in Linux. All versions of
> MS-DOS and the command line interpreter within Windows fail gracefully
> (i.e.: they don't report a drive), even for DOS 6.22.
>
> Any installation program really needs to know three things:
> -- Does a drive exist
> -- Is it writeable
> -- How much free space is present.
>
> If I can't meet these objectives then I'm pretty much at an impasse. If
> anyone can offer an alternative please advise.
>
> Thanks,
> Bruce
>
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 2:30 PM, bruce.bowman tds.net <
> bruce.bow...@tds.net> wrote:
>
>> Right now I have something like this going on.
>>
>> A: is the floppy bootup image.
>> B: could be a floppy so I don't want that to be probed
>> Y: is the drive letter assigned to the CD that I booted from.
>> Z: is a ramdrive.
>>
>> for %%d in (c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x) do (
>> if exist %%d:\mygame\ (
>> cls
>> echo.
>> echo.
>> echo.
>> echo A previous installation of MYGAME was found on drive %%d:
>> choice /B /N /C:YN /T:Y,10 Should I run the game from this location
>> [recommended]
>> if not errorlevel 2 (
>> swsubst %progdisk% %%d:\mygame\
>> goto finish
>> )
>> )
>> )
>>
>> REM either didn't find an installation, or didn't want to use it
>> set progdisk = z:
>> copy Y:\mygame\*.* %progdisk% > nul
>>
>> :finish
>> %progdisk%
>> rungame
>>
>> FreeDOS doesn't seem to like the compound IF very much. Thoughts
>> appreciated.
>>
>> Bruce
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:49 PM, Bernd Blaauw <bbla...@home.nl> wrote:
>>
>>> Op 27-11-2012 6:45, bruce.bowman tds.net schreef:
>>>
>>> > In fact I am essentially done with my project but still want something
>>> I
>>> > can throw in a batch file to probe for writeable drive letters so I can
>>> > give the user an opportunity to save a game and resume later (like they
>>> > used to).
>>>
>>> DOS kernels only assign driveletters to FAT filesystems. For (emulated?)
>>> floppy drives A: and B: get assigned, thus C: till Z: get assigned to
>>> everything else.
>>>
>>> A FAT filesystem contains the NUL blockdevice, making it easy to test:
>>>
>>> @echo off
>>> IF EXIST C:\NUL echo Driveletter C: points to a FAT filesystem.
>>>
>>> Testing if you can store files on the drive is a different issue
>>> altogether, as it involves:
>>> * checking if the drive isn't full yet
>>> * checking if the drive isn't write-protected (read-only)
>>> * checking if there's enough free diskspace
>>>
>>> Bernd
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> Monitor your physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure from a single
>>> web console. Get in-depth insight into apps, servers, databases, vmware,
>>> SAP, cloud infrastructure, etc. Download 30-day Free Trial.
>>> Pricing starts from $795 for 25 servers or applications!
>>> http://p.sf.net/sfu/zoho_dev2dev_nov
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Freedos-user mailing list
>>> Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
>>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Sent from my meager, humble desktop computer.
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Sent from my meager, humble desktop computer.
>
>
--
Sent from my meager, humble desktop computer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Keep yourself connected to Go Parallel:
INSIGHTS What's next for parallel hardware, programming and related areas?
Interviews and blogs by thought leaders keep you ahead of the curve.
http://goparallel.sourceforge.net
_______________________________________________
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
