Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!lll-winken!uunet!philmtl!philabs!ttidca!woodside
From: woodside@ttidca.TTI.COM (George Woodside)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Hard Drive
Message-ID: <5982@ttidca.TTI.COM>
Date: 12 Sep 89 12:22:27 GMT
References: <89091023103918@masnet.uucp>
Reply-To: woodside@ttidcb.tti.com (George Woodside)
Organization: Citicorp/TTI, Santa Monica
Lines: 34

In article <89091023103918@masnet.uucp> calvin.bruner@canremote.uucp (CALVIN BRUNER) writes:
>I have a peculiar question....does anyone know if you can label a hard
>drive segment as Drive "B", or is that reserved for floppys?  I have a
>cartridge which only wants to access drives A or B, and wondered if just 
>reformatting (ugh!) my hard drive and labelling one segment as B would
>do it? 
>Thanks
>---
> * Via ProDoor 3.01R 


It will fail.

Drives A, a, B, and b are floppies. Functions to those drives use
the floppy disk I/O vectors. Drive c is the cartridge port. Drives
C-P and d-p are all vectored through another set of vectors, referred
to as the hard disk vectors. In reality, they can be any type of
storage media. It need only add itself to the vector, and support the
proper functions.

Note that support of 'A', 'a', 'B', and 'b' do not constitute four drives,
only two. Drive 'C' is the only one with a case differentation. This
differentation is really only effective on the desktop. Most shells
normalize the case of drives and paths before calling the operating
system.

Consequentally, if you were able to designate a drive 'b' or 'B' on
your hard disk, you would be unable to access it. All calls to the drive
would go to the floppy disk vectors. If you had only one floppy drive,
you would get the "Insert disk B into drive A" prompts.

-- 
*George R. Woodside - Citicorp/TTI - Santa Monica, CA 
*Path:       ..!{philabs|csun|psivax}!ttidca!woodside