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From: bmarsh@cod.NOSC.MIL (William C. Marsh)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Disk Driver Formatting in DOS 4.01
Keywords: driver formatting DOS 4.01
Message-ID: <1616@cod.NOSC.MIL>
Date: 21 Aug 89 15:44:53 GMT
Organization: Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego
Lines: 29


Hello, fellow netters!

I am having problems with a disk device driver under DOS 4.01.  This is a
driver I wrote to support a different format on 3.5" disks.  (It's not a
really different format, just a different cluster size...).  This driver
works perfectly well for reading and writing for all DOS versions tried,
and that includes 2.x, 3.x and 4.0x.  The formatting routines were added
for DOS 3.2, and work perfectly well for 3.2 and 3.3, but they do not
work for 4.0X.

What happens is DOS formats the disk fine, writes the boot sector, and 
then complains that it couldn't write 'BOOT', track 0 bad, etc.  However,
the sector is written properly, according to both Norton and a INT-13
sniffer I wrote.  The driver only uses the BIOS routines for interfacing
to the disk.

Since formatting isn't really covered in any book I have found in detail,
I need to turn to the Net!  If anyone can point out a reference (DOS 
technical reference 3.2, and the new Advanced Dos book have equal coverage)
or advice I would appreciate it very much!

Thanks in advance!

Bill Marsh, Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego, CA
{arpa,mil}net: bmarsh@cod.nosc.mil
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