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From: pegram@kira.UUCP (Robert B. Pegram)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Tos File limit was: Major Problems Unpacking 'lzh' Files
Message-ID: <1991Jan10.183710.3994@uvm.edu>
Date: 10 Jan 91 18:37:10 GMT
References: <27995@cs.yale.edu>
Sender: news@uvm.edu
Organization: University of Vermont, Department of Computer Science
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From article <27995@cs.yale.edu>, 
by fischer-michael@cs.yale.edu (Michael Fischer):

I wrote:

an incorrect description of why Dos/Tos floppies can only have 113
files in the root directory:

>>Um, I regularly have more than 113 files in a _SubDirectory_ the
>>problem only crops up with the _Root_ directory.
...
mostly omitted, so I don't increase my embarassment 8-) 8-).
...
>>Maybe a quick Dos - Tos disk format refresher is in order?

Michael Fischer corrects and clarifies:
 
> A Dos/Tos disk is divided up into several fixed-sized regions: boot
> sector, FAT (2 copies, actually), root directory, and data.  The sizes
> of these regions are determined when the disk is formatted and can
> differ from disk to disk.  The FAT must be big enough to hold the
> entries describing the allocation of clusters in the data region;
> beyond that, bigger isn't better.  The root directory on a floppy is
> typically 7 sectors, which is big enough for 112 entries.  On a hard
> disk, the root directory is often made considerably larger.
> Subdirectories are stored like files in the data region and can be any
> length.  That's why the size restriction doesn't apply to them.
> 
> -- 
> ==================================================
> | Michael Fischer <fischer-michael@cs.yale.edu>  |
> ==================================================

Ah that's it, and it's worth repeating, clearly I should have talked
about the size of the root directory rather than of the FAT.
Hypercopy does allow you to format with user specified root directory
sizes, helping the problem on floppies, as I mentioned in my earlier
posting.  Still, that leaves David Baggett's problem under Gulaam.
Anybody know what gives with that shell?

Bob Pegram

pegram@griffin.uvm.edu
	or
uunet!uvm-gen!pegram

Hmmm, I gotta be more accurate or people will start putting ME in
their kill files! 8-) RBPIII