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From: M.Jones@massey.ac.nz (Michael Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Polling Drives
Message-ID: <161cs-sunc@massey.ac.nz>
Date: 12 Nov 89 20:35:05 GMT
Reply-To: M.Jones@massey.ac.nz
Organization: Comp Sci, Massey Univ, Palmerston North, New Zealand
Lines: 29

I am writing a program in Turbo Pascal 5.50 to check the configuration of
a PC. The program is to be sent to extramural students so will be used on
a large range of PCs. I have come to a bit of a stumbling block when
checking the drives as I can find no way of checking the drive type
(360KB 5.25", 1.2MB 5.25", 720KB 3.5", etc..) of a floppy drive without
the user having to insert a disk. The only methods I know of will
only tell me what type of disk is in the drive - not much good if
someone puts a 360K disk in a 1.2M drive, which is quite likely to
happen as many of the students have never seen a computer before.

As well as this I want to be able to differentiate between physical and
virtual drives - if the PC has ram disks, virtual network drives etc,
I do not want to record them as physical drives.

Also I have had problems in determining the number of drives the PC has.
Using Dos function 0EH which I thought should return the number of logical
drives in the AL register, seems to return 5 for any PC with anything up
to 5 drives.

Lastly, how does one tell if a PC is an XT or an AT?

I would greatly appreciate any help.

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#       \|||/        Michael Jones             Phone +64 +63 69099 Ext 7816 #
#       /   \        Computer Science Dept                                  #
#      / O O \       Massey University         E-mail: M.Jones@massey.ac.nz #
# =000====U====000=  Palmerston North, NZ                                   #
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