Opened 14 years ago

Closed 9 years ago

Last modified 8 years ago

#11 closed enhancement (invalid)

Removable as floppy support

Reported by: abwillis Owned by: somebody
Priority: major Milestone:
Component: IFS Version:
Severity: highest Keywords:
Cc:

Description

Currently only FAT can be used for Removable as floppy support. It would be good to be able to use FAT32 as many USB devices now ship this way. I don't know if this can be implemented in the IFS or if it would require an FLT or something else. I don't expect this will be trivial or quickly done but wanted to have the request on record.

Change History (2)

comment:1 Changed 9 years ago by abwillis

Resolution: invalid
Status: newclosed

Being implemented in usbmsd.add

comment:2 Changed 8 years ago by Valery V. Sedletski

Severity: highest

If I understand correctly, here is meant that only FAT drives can be Large Floppies (i.e., removables without a Partition Table). Unfortunately, this is how OS2DASD works. OS2DASD performs a set of heuristics, to determine, if the media begins from MBR or a Boot Sector. Actually, if it sees that it starts from a two-byte JMP opcode, followed by NOP (a jump in the start of a boot sector, which passes by the BIOS Parameter Block), it thinks it is a boot sector, hence, the media is a Large Floppy. Then it considers that Large Floppy must be a FAT drive and it mounts the kernel FAT driver on it. So, because of this, OS/2 "thinks" that Large Floppies must be FAT12/FAT16. Unfortunately, FAT32 is not supported in the kernel FAT driver and it is supported by an IFS. So, to change this, there may be two ways: 1) enhance the kernel FAT driver to support FAT32 2) enhance OS2DASD to support more advanced heuristics, or allow to explicitly issue the "mount"-like command for user to specify, if the disk is Large Floppy and which FS to mount. The filter driver seems to be unlikely to solve this problem, as the problem is with OS2DASD's internal logic.

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