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From: bro@eunomia.rice.edu (Douglas Monk)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st.tech
Subject: Re: MSDOS & SUNSparc1
Summary: What he said...
Message-ID: <1991Mar2.045404.2229@rice.edu>
Date: 2 Mar 91 04:54:04 GMT
References: <1991Feb27.132904.748@bigsur.uucp> <11000@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
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Organization: Rice University, Houston
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In article <11000@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> cliff@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Clifford
Stein) writes:
>In article <1991Feb27.132904.748@bigsur.uucp> brad@bcars362.UUCP (Brad 
Shapcott) writes:
>>[...]  But beyond being able to read the directory and the 
>>first few bytes of any file, there doesn't seem to be much I can do with a 
>>disk made this way.  I tried formatting on both the SUN and the Atari, and 
>>the disks work fine on the SUN.  Same problem as above though when I put the
>>disk into the ST.

>[...]  Mtools works fine going from ST -> SUN but I had problems going from
>SUN->ST.

SUN->PC will also work fine. The problem with the earlier versions of mtools
was that by default, it only wrote one copy of the FAT, and Ataris depend on
the second copy. IBMs work OK with only the one FAT for some reason.

>Try compiling the init.c code with the DUP_FLAG set; it has something to do
>with rewriting FAT tables.  I haven't had a chance to give it a shot, so
>I don't know if it works for sure.

I had the problem, and this is indeed the fix, except the flag is DUP_FAT.
As someone else pointed out, a later MTOOLS version fixed this problem,
but I have had trouble with our site's installation of it, so I still use
my own copy (which *I* support :-).

Caveats: like IBM formatted disks, there won't be a random serial number
on the disk, so you need to exercise caution putting them in: either keep
them write-protected in the Atari or swap another disk in and out between
any two of them. Also remember that you can only use double-sided regular
density (720K) floppy format), not single-sided (360K) nor high density
(1.44M) formats.

Doug Monk (bro@rice.edu)

Disclaimer: These views are mine, not necessarily my organization's.