Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tank!oddjob!gargoyle!att!mtuxo!mtgzz!drutx!druhi!dlm
From: dlm@druhi.ATT.COM (Dan Moore)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Bugs in new BETA ROMS?
Message-ID: <3525@druhi.ATT.COM>
Date: 6 Sep 88 19:53:38 GMT
References: <1947@brahma.cs.hw.ac.uk>
Distribution: comp
Organization: AT&T, Denver, CO
Lines: 35

in article <1947@brahma.cs.hw.ac.uk>, neil@cs.hw.ac.uk (Neil Forsyth) says:
> In article <3479@druhi.ATT.COM> med@druhi.ATT.COM (Myron Drapal) writes:
>>to be tested and fixed (like PC compatible format... Oh, by the way, have
>>any of the testers checked to see if the disk free function works properly
>>yet - the old version reported number of free bytes off by at least
>>2 clusters).
> I have been sitting here listening with nothing to say for days then something
> pops up that I actually know something about! Magic!
> 
> Atari (Allen|Roy|Ken) said yonks ago that they had found and killed the bug
> that lost 2 clusters on a disk. But what if you put a the disk in a mchine with
> old ROMs? It can't read the last two clusters! So, sadly, the bug stays.


	Are you sure that the old ROMs can't read the last two clusters
on the disk?  The one time I did some testing on this (about 2 years
ago) I found the ST could always read every cluster on an PC/DOS
formatted disk, including the last two clusters.  I spent a fair amount
of time working on this since I was writting a PC/DOS style CHKDSK
program.  I wanted to make sure that the two missing clusters were
really missing and not an artifact of my program.  I spent a lot of time
formatting disks on both my PC and my ST and comparing them.  My
conclusion was that GemDos was quite happy to read a disk using the last
two clusters.  It also could delete files that used those clusters.  It
just couldn't write to them and also didn't include them in the disk
free space calculation.  This means you should be able to fix the
free-space bug in GemDos without breaking STs with the old ROMs.
The old machines could still read the files written by the newer ROMs,
just like they can read files on a PC/DOS disk.


					Dan Moore
					AT&T Bell Labs
					Denver
					dlm@druhi.ATT.COM