Re: Off topic: enhanced DOS

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Patricia M Godfrey wrote:

> Jordan, Windows 9x, though not Me, Y2K, and XP, is underlain by a real
> DOS. I just tried accessing my largest single partition (C:, which is
> roughly 9 Gig; the whole drive is 40 G, but only 20 are allowed to
> Microslush, and that 20 G is partitioned into 4 logical drives) from Win
> 98, 2d ed.'s, DOS both from a Restart in MS-DOS mode, a reboot and then
> Command prompt only (by hitting F8), and a reboot from a plain-vanilla
> boot floppy. All were able to "see" the whole Drive C: with the chkdsk
> command.

Patricia,

W98, by default, creates and works with / from FAT-32 -- that was the new
partitioning scheme it introduced, to make room for its very space-wasteful ways.
In fact, this may have come in with W95 -- I don't recall. [Semi-humorous aside:
my young nephew and nieces jointly inherited an older Pentium system, retrofitted
with a large hard drive, for accessing the 'Net, e-mail, games, and general
fooling around. The new drive started with a clean install of W98. There are
still a few "serious" things on there like WURD. You might think 40 Gig would be
enough, even split 2 and 1/2 ways. (The youngest kid doesn't use the computer
much, yet.) It isn't. I'm about to expand partitions over there for the 3rd.
time, and that will be the end of the available space. After that, it's time for
a new H/D, more likely a new computer.] W2K is much worse, XP worse still. It
just keeps going up and up. The hardware mfr.s love this ! Give 'em more RAM,
faster cpu, gigantic hard drives ! The need for a whole new computer every 18
months. I have to laugh, because 2 - 3 Gig is a plenty big partition for eCS, the
latest iteration of OS/2. (Earlier versions could get away with just 500 meg.s)
Throw in a couple App.s Only partitions of 2 or 3 Gig size, and a couple data
partitions -- you're still talking peanuts ! I switched my 9G boot drive to be
the 2nd. H/D, in favor of an 18 Gig-er, but that was only due to the age of the
original drive. Today, you have to hunt around to find hard drives much smaller
than 36G.

The reason you can see the whole hard drive is that you were always doing so from
the vantage point of W98 and FAT-32. I'm going to make a wild guess here, and
assume that your "plain vanilla" DOS disk for booting purposes was the W98
Emergency Recovery Diskette. That boots the W98 DOS Core, plus some utilities,
and it has some kind of FAT-32 IFS filter included, which allows one to see
everything. Otherwise, it wouldn't be very useful. I can run the experiment
again on my next re-boot cycle, but I'm 90+ % sure that if I boot my PC-DOS 2000
floppy, I won't be able to see more than 8G out. It's not that useful a test
*here*, though, because H/D #2 only has 9G, the final 1G of which is unformatted.
Drive #1 has various HPFS and NTFS partitions that DOS can't see no matter what.
(Well, technically, there are IFS filters for DOS, intended to let you see into
those partition types, even one for Mac partitions, but I've never tried them, and
don't know how well they may work.) If you are doing this with a floppy boot of
real DOS, un-beefed-up with special assistance of this kind, and *still* see to
the end of a large hard drive, or see the contents of FAT-32 partitions, then
something must be flawed in my understanding of these matters.

> I do have a copy of Novell DOS 7 (which is what TTG ran XyDOS on) somewhere, and
> will see
> what booting from that yields, but I very much doubt it can read FAT32,
> though its memory managing capabilities--DOS Protected mode, meaning it
> could access all your RAM--were far superior to Microsoft's.

This is something I might be interested in checking out. Network hard drives were
probably on the large side, even way back when. The IFS (Installable File System)
issue is soluble, the "distance-vision" thing with DOS itself may not be. By this
I mean, you can have FAT-16 partitions -- as many as will fit -- taking up the
first 20G of the H/D, but DOS won't see anything much past 8G. Stuff may be
recorded there, but as far as DOS is concerned, the world ends right there, at the
edge of a cliff. Maybe Novell hacked out some fix for this.

>     By the by, perhaps DOS (pre 32-bit Windows) cannot "see" FAT32 drives,
> but Xy can. All four of my logical drives are FAT32, but Xy sits on one
> (D:) and reads and writes files to all four, most especially E:, my data
> drive. (Except, of course, C:\ProgramFiles, as we've discussed here
> before.) With 8.3 filenames of course, but it reads them.

Again, that is because your XyDOS (or XyWin) is itself ensconced on a FAT-32
drive, and operating under W98. Just try booting real DOS from a floppy, then run
Xy from floppy, and tell me what you can see on your hard drive.

Jordan