From:	"Matthias Paul" <PAUL-MA AT reze-1 DOT rz DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
Organization:	Rechenzentrum RWTH Aachen
To:	opendos AT delorie DOT com
Date:	Thu, 9 Nov 2000 18:47:13 +0100
Subject:	Re: DRDOS FDISK
X-mailer:	Pegasus Mail v3.22
Message-ID:	<6E3407573B7@reze-1.rz.rwth-aachen.de>
Reply-To:	opendos AT delorie DOT com

On Wed, 01 Nov 2000 Patrick Moran wrote:

> [...] I was
> trying to find out what the problem with FDISK is and their does not appear
> to be any. It is the format it puts on the disk that is a problem. I use
> DRDOS FDiSK to make NTFS, FAT 32, ext2fs and FAT 16 partitions and never had
> a problem with any of those partitions.

Since the root for all the trouble is the value reported by the 
Generic IOCTL function, it could be, that running the DR-DOS tools 
on MS-DOS/PC DOS will *not* show the problem. I didn't tried so far.
Anyone?

> [...]
> > Either that one or the one at offset 0Ah in the BPB - I'll guess that DOS
> > uses the FAT one in preference to the BPB one.
> 
> I don't think so. I am not certain what that is used for, it is an extended
> signature byte. It may be different in some versions, but it seems like it
> was always a 29 hex. (At least for HDD.)

This signature (29h fixed) is officially used to detect an extended 
BPB. (The use of the OEM label to make a few more decisions how to 
interpret the stuff is not documented as far as I can tell.)

 Matthias
 
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Matthias Paul, Ubierstrasse 28, D-50321 Bruehl, Germany
eMail: <Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
Web  : http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html
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