Message-ID: <01FD6EC775C6D4119CDF0090273F74A4FD68CF@emwatent02.meters.com.au>
From: "da Silva, Joe" <Joe DOT daSilva AT emailmetering DOT com>
To: "'opendos AT delorie DOT com'" <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: RE: CD-ROM Compatibility
Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 11:39:42 +1000 
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Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com

Thanks Matthias.

I don't have a CD burner, and I don't know what "finalizing" a CD-R
means, but I will ask someone else that does have a burner, to
see if they know what this is about.

I tried the /K option of NWCDEX, but this made no difference.

Then I tried Odi's LFN tools, since AFAIK, these bypass the MSCDEX
or NWCDEX stuff. Success! Now I can see the contents of the disk.
If I make enough space on my hard drive, I can probably also copy
the CD-ROM contents to it. This is better than nothing, although I
still can't directly access the CD-ROM.

One other thing Odi's LFN tools provides, is a utility called LCHK,
which gives a bit of information about a disk. Using this, I compared
the problematic disk with another CD-ROM, which works fine under
DR-DOS. Both disks were reported as Joliet, so that in itself can't
be the compatibility problem. In fact, there were only two differences
I could see in the LCHK information :
1. The "good" CD-ROM had (IIRC) a "starting boot sector" of 24,
    whereas the "bad" CD-ROM had a "starting boot sector" of about
   24000.
2. The label volume of the "good" CD-ROM was a conventional
   alpha-numeric string, whereas the label volume of the "bad"
   CD-ROM, although 11 characters long, included lower case
   letters and spaces.

I wonder, would either (1) and (2) above, explain why this disk
causes problems in DOS, especially DR-DOS (6.0 and 7.02+)?

Joe.

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Matthias Paul [SMTP:Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de]
> Sent:	Friday, September 27, 2002 7:30 PM
> To:	opendos AT delorie DOT com
> Subject:	Re: CD-ROM Compatibility
> 
> On 2002-09-27, Joe da Silva wrote:
> 
> > 2. Neither MSCDEX nor NWCDEX support "Joliet" CD-ROM's.
> 
> Yes, they don't, but AFAIR Joliet is a meta filesystem on top
> of ISO 9660, so you should still be able to access the files,
> but under more cryptic file names.
> 
> > BTW, I've had one CD-ROM previously, in which I couldn't access the
> > files in DOS due to LFN issues, but never before had I encountered
> > one in which any attempt to access the disk under DOS would result
> > in an I/O error.
> 
> Other possibilities:
> 
> - the CD is not finalized. Finalize it, if you have a CD burner.
> - the CD has incompatible supplementary volume descriptors. Try NWCDEX /K.
> 
> Hope it helps,
> 
>  Matthias
> 
> -- 
> <mailto:Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>; <mailto:mpaul AT drdos DOT org>
> http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html; http://mpaul.drdos.org
> 
> "Programs are poems for computers."
>