On 11/24/2019 2:41 PM, Jon Brase wrote:
To expand on why CHKDSK itself can't deal with FAT32, Freedos tries to
retain compatibility with quite a broad range of hardware, including
both any 8086 machines that anybody still has lying around, and modern
hardware. So CHKDSK has to be able to be able to work on 8086s. This
means that it can't depend on the availability of anything more than
640k of conventional RAM, which makes it difficult to deal with FAT32,
and such machines are unlikely to have disks big enough to need FAT32
anyway. Thus there is a separate tool, ported from Linux, to deal with
FAT32 on beefier machines (i.e, most hardware released since 1990 or so).
Microsoft didn't have this constraint when they released FAT32 with
Win95, as they'd already determined that Win95 would not run on
machines that old, so MS CHKDSK has been able to deal with FAT32 since
it was released.
There is no inherit reason as to why the FreeDOS chkdsk program would
not be able to deal with FAT32 in the same way as the plain DOS chkdsk
that came with Windows 95 ("DOS 7.0") was able to deal with it. It just
requires mainly the knowledge of all the pitfalls of FAT32 compared to
FAT12/16 of previous DOS versions.
Beside that, "MS-DOS 7.0" chkdsk also did only a very rudimentary check
on FAT32 partitions, depending on the issue it would encounter, you
would get the message to try and run Scandisk, which was a new tool that
was included starting with MS-DOS 6.00, and for which there isn't an
equivalent tool for FreeDOS...
Ralf
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