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From: carl@bwkna.UUCP (Carl Mee III)
Newsgroups: net.micro,net.micro.pc
Subject: PC 6300 Disk Error Recovery (help wanted)
Message-ID: <181@bwkna.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 19-Apr-85 19:13:04 EST
Article-I.D.: bwkna.181
Posted: Fri Apr 19 19:13:04 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 20-Apr-85 08:13:02 EST
Distribution: net
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Whippany
Lines: 16
Xref: watmath net.micro:10084 net.micro.pc:3725

For a C program (Computer Innovations C86 C compiler and library)
running under MS-DOS, how can I avoid the "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
prompt that occurs when I try to access a non-existent drive,
a drive with no floppy inserted, or a write attempt on a write-
protected disk?  Two approaches come to mind: (1) Catch the interrupt
(24H?) when the error occurs and provide my own error recovery
routine that returns an error indication to the calling C routine,
and (2) test the drive status somehow before trying the read or
write call (use int 13H?).  A third possibility might be to read
the controller status register directly.  At the moment, I don't
know how to do any of these successfully.  Any help would be appreciated.

Carl Mee
AT&T Bell Labs
Whippany, NJ
(201) 386-4324