U5533129@ucsvc.ucs.unimelb.edu.au (CARDIOLOGY, R.M.H.) (02/09/90)
The disk parameter table is normally set up by the formatting program before formatting a disk. Formatting programs have to be told by the user what format to use for a given drive, so I assume the machine has no way of telling the format of an unformatted disk. I suspect that DOS reads the disk type from the file allocation table when a formatted disk is inserted, which isn't much help to you. I think you program either; needs the user to tell it what media it needs with parameters or will have to go off and try and find sectors for itself. For example, looking for track 79 head 1 sector 14 should work on a 1.2M disk, but fail on a 360k disk. You may have to experiment with this. Please let me now what works and how you get on. If you get something running I would rather like a copy if that is possible. I've done some fairly heavy debugging of the FDFORMAT floppy disk formatting program. I have all the source and documentation on the int 13 bios calls and now know a reasonable amount about formatting floppy disks (I like to think). Mail me if you get have any other problems, or this doesn't work, or you find more information about your problem. Cheers, Peter S. I tried to mail you but our mailer is misbehaving.