Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pacbell!att!mtuxo!mtgzz!drutx!druhi!med
From: med@druhi.ATT.COM (Myron Drapal)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: PC compatible(?) format on the ST
Message-ID: <3461@druhi.ATT.COM>
Date: 30 Aug 88 02:56:47 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: AT&T, Denver, CO
Lines: 29

First off, this is a followup to a posting I made yesterday regarding
the incompatible PC format from the new BETA ROMs.  Allan Pratt claims
that this is fixed in the new BETA ROMs, and indeed it is -- that is if
you never want to store a file on it!!!

After a little bit of investigating, and some real insightful help from
Dan Moore (thanks, Dan), it seems that the double sided format is almost
compatible, except that a standard PC formatted disk has 3 sectors per
FAT, and the ST formats them with a standard(?) 5 sectors per FAT.  Since
most (all) MS-DOS systems simply check the format ID (in this case, 0xF9)
to get its information, and ignores most if not all of the rest of the
boot sector information, the PC thinks that the root directory starts
somewhere in the middle of the second FAT on this disk!!!  So, CHKDSK
is very happy with this disk, until you put a file on it on the ST, at
which time it complains that there are lost clusters on the disk (since
the first FAT shows them in their proper place, but they aren't in the
root directory).

Well, after all of this, I am really wondering how much BETA testing(??)
that these ROMs have gone through.  You see, I really don't even have a
set of these ROMS, and have managed to find what I consider a major bug.
Are these ROMs even being tested, or are we all in line for another
MEGA ROM snafu??? (you all remember that one, don't you - everything
broke including the kitchen sink ;-{ ).  I sure hope that we aren't in for
the same thing again - Atari will never be able to live through such
a mess again, at least not in the computer market.

					Myron Drapal
					AT&T Denver
					att!druhi!med