hinton@netcom.UUCP (Greg Hinton) (10/21/89)
The structure of the MS-DOS filesystem through version 3.30 is very well documented in such books as _The MS-DOS Encyclopedia_, etc. But so far I haven't been able to find a single thing detailing the structure of the so-called "Bigfoot" filesystem used in versions 3.31 and 4.0. None of the third-party books that claim to be updated for version 4.0 have anything. A call to Microsoft technical assistance got nowhere. Can anyone out there lead me to this information? It must be documented somewhere. Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Thank you. -- Greg Hinton DOMAIN: hinton@netcom.uucp UUCP: uunet!apple!netcom!hinton
chasm@attctc.Dallas.TX.US (Charles Marslett) (10/23/89)
In article <3284@netcom.UUCP>, hinton@netcom.UUCP (Greg Hinton) writes: > The structure of the MS-DOS filesystem through version 3.30 is very well > documented in such books as _The MS-DOS Encyclopedia_, etc. > But so far I haven't been able to find a single thing detailing > the structure of the so-called "Bigfoot" filesystem used in versions > 3.31 and 4.0. None of the third-party books that claim to be updated > for version 4.0 have anything. A call to Microsoft technical assistance > got nowhere. > > Can anyone out there lead me to this information? It must be documented > somewhere. Any assistance is greatly appreciated. The 4.0 file system is really just like the old 3.0 (16-bit FAT) file system: but since it now allows the product of the number of clusters and the size of a cluster (in sectors) to be greater than 65535, it allows the disk partition to exceed 32 MB (with a 512-byte sector size). The real impact was that the INT 25h and INT 26h (I believe, anyway, the read sector and write sector interrupt calls) now are passed the sector number in memory (or on the stack, I can't remember for sure). This allows DOS to access sectors past 65535. Of course, the FAT can be bigger (up to 65537 words or 129(?) sectors). There are also some minor differences (I think they are minor, anyway) in the structure of the partition tables, but you normally can ignore these. > Thank you. > -- > Greg Hinton You're very welcome (and I hope I have helped, in fact), Charles =============================================================================== "Those who would sacrifice ** Charles Marslett liberty for security, ** STB Systems, Inc. <-- apply all std. disclaimers deserve neither." ** Wordmark Systems <-- that's just me -- Benjamin Franklin ** chasm\@attctc.dallas.tx.us -------------------------------------------------------------------------------