[net.micro.atari8] Anyone have a good method to detect the presence of Ramdisks?

wa60@sdcc12.UUCP (paul van de graaf{}) (04/10/86)

	I have an application that needs to detect the presence of Ramdisks,
and the particular drive number each resides.  It's fairly easy to detect 
whether a machine has 130XE compatible memory expansion, but hard to cleanly
figure out whether the it's used as a Ramdisk, and if so which drive number.
Not to mention the Ramdisks which aren't XE compatible!

	So far, All I've come up with is this:  I go through all of the disk
drives, and attempt to read each drive's directory.  If there's an error,
I assume there's no drive present, otherwise I time how long it takes to
read the directory.  If it's under a second or so, I assume it's a Ramdisk.

	This works OK, but it's rather slow.  Especially because of the long
time-outs on a failed open of a directory.  I tried using the Get Status
Command of the CIO routine which is conciderably faster, but it fails to
detect Ramdisks, because they obviously can't reply to serial bus commands.

	Anybody have a better solution?  I've considered using a configuration
file, but I'd like to automate the proceedure so the user needn't bother
with such stuff.

Thanks in advance,

Paul van de Graaf	Usenet:   sdcsvax!sdcc12!wa60
@ U. C. San Diego	Arpanet:  wa60%sdcc12@ucsd.arpa