M.Jones@massey.ac.nz (Michael Jones) (11/13/89)
I am writing a program in Turbo Pascal 5.50 to check the configuration of a PC. The program is to be sent to extramural students so will be used on a large range of PCs. I have come to a bit of a stumbling block when checking the drives as I can find no way of checking the drive type (360KB 5.25", 1.2MB 5.25", 720KB 3.5", etc..) of a floppy drive without the user having to insert a disk. The only methods I know of will only tell me what type of disk is in the drive - not much good if someone puts a 360K disk in a 1.2M drive, which is quite likely to happen as many of the students have never seen a computer before. As well as this I want to be able to differentiate between physical and virtual drives - if the PC has ram disks, virtual network drives etc, I do not want to record them as physical drives. Also I have had problems in determining the number of drives the PC has. Using Dos function 0EH which I thought should return the number of logical drives in the AL register, seems to return 5 for any PC with anything up to 5 drives. Lastly, how does one tell if a PC is an XT or an AT? I would greatly appreciate any help. ############################################################################# # \|||/ Michael Jones Phone +64 +63 69099 Ext 7816 # # / \ Computer Science Dept # # / O O \ Massey University E-mail: M.Jones@massey.ac.nz # # =000====U====000= Palmerston North, NZ # #############################################################################
akcs.larry@nstar.UUCP (Larry Snyder) (11/14/89)
>Lastly, how does one tell if a PC is an XT or an AT?
Usually by the CPU - an PC/XT uses an 8088/V-20/8086 where as the AT
family uses at 16/16 bit CPU like an 80286/80386.