Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!execu!sequoia!rpp386!aubrey
From: aubrey@rpp386.cactus.org (Aubrey McIntosh)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Custom Format.exe for DOS;   was: 3.5" disks, PS/2 model 50Z
Message-ID: <17556@rpp386.cactus.org>
Date: 4 Jan 90 16:14:46 GMT
References: <2879@dogie.macc.wisc.edu> <3060@plains.UUCP> <5032@ast.cs.vu.nl> <18528@bcsaic.UUCP>
Reply-To: aubrey@rpp386.UUCP (Aubrey McIntosh)
Organization: vima, Austin TX
Lines: 26

In article <18528@bcsaic.UUCP> paula@bcsaic.UUCP (Paul Allen) writes:
>I got tired of the glacial speed of the floppy driver under 1.3 and
>decided to add interleaving.  But since all my existing floppies were
>written by the old driver, needed to be able to deal with both
>interleaved and non-interleaved floppies.  Also, in order to do
>interleaving, you need to know the sectors per track, which depends on
>the drive/media combination.  But the driver tries different
>combinations if if gets errors.  It seems like the driver ought to
>return EOF (or something) if you try to access beyond the end of the
>media, but you can't know what type of media you've got until you have
>a successful transfer, which you can't have if the requested block is
>off the end of the disk!  Aaaagh!
>

I'll gen a MS-DOS .exe file to physically interleave a floppy if anyone
asks.  I need to know:
tracks sectors sides (2 right? :-) ) and desired interleave pattern.
I can also give some debug hooks, possibly supporting Symdeb (or codeview,
but I can't verify.)


-- 
Aubrey McIntosh                  Freelance using Modula-2
                                 Real time, embedded, instruments.
Austin, TX 78723                 Enquiries welcome
1-(512)-452-1540                 aubrey%rpp386.Cactus.org@cs.utexas.edu