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From: dixon@sagittarius.crd.ge.com (walt dixon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.programmer
Subject: Re: can you tell if a logical drive is a ramdisk
Message-ID: <6804@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Date: 13 Apr 90 11:53:52 GMT
References: <1990Mar31.034515.7622@rducky.uucp> <5450@pte.UUCP> <1990Apr3.054032.572@rducky.uucp> <90093.125330JXS118@psuvm.psu.edu> <1990Apr4.100020.1437@iesd.auc.dk> <6547@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <1990Apr5.202055.19114@Octopus.COM>
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Reply-To: dixon@sagittarius.crd.ge.com (walt dixon)
Organization: General Electric Corp. R&D, Schenectady, NY
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In a follow up to a previous posting Steve Resnick (stever@octopus.UUCP)
writes:

>Floppies have one fat also, but I would think that if you checked the number
>of FAT's on drives C: and higher you should be able to find the "Ram Disk"
>but this will still fail on any other IBM format block device which uses
> one fat. (I don't know if net drives will show up this way)...

The floppy disks that I have looked at (360K 5.25", 1.2M 5.25" and 720K
3.25") all have two FATs;  at least that is what the boot record claims.
As far as network drives go,  there can be no assumptions made as to
their structure,  ie they may not be msdos block devices.  The versions
of DOS with which I am familiar do not allow absolute reads/writes to
network devices for this reason.  The status field of the current directory
structure has bit 15 set for network devices.

Although there is no technical reason why a ram disk could not be made
available as a network resource,  I feel that a networked ram disk is
of limited usefulness;  consequently I would assume that a networked
device is not a ram disk.

Walt Dixon		{arpa:		dixon@crd.ge.com	}
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Walt Dixon dixon@crd.ge.com