braner@batcomputer.UUCP (03/24/87)
[] I didn't think AUTOCOPY and FLEXCOPY would work with floppy disks formatted with the 'fast' format (the one with a bad tenth sector). But turns out they do. The speed improvement is about two-fold for reading - great for autoloading of a lot of stuff into RAMdisk on boot. To copy a disk to a 'fast' disk with FLEXCOPY, you have to format the destination disk with FORMATER.PRG _before_ you run FLEXCOPY. And BTW, FLEXCOPY will let you back up such a disk relatively easily. (STCOPY won't.) Note that FLEXCOPY and AUTOCOPY use the Rwabs() call to read and write the disk, so any disk format that looks normal as far as Rwabs() calls are concerned (i.e. has the normal _logical_ sectors) should work with those programs. STCOPY reads whole tracks at a time, I believe (for that awesome speed reading _standard_ disks), and therefore has problems with 'fast' disks. Rwabs(), on the other hand, reads sector by sector (roughly - anybody knows _exactly_ what it does?), even when reading a _lot_ of consecutive sectors in one call. Half the speed (on standard disks) but more flexible. I do not have a copy of 'twister', so I don't know if that is also compatible with AUTOCOPY and FLEXCOPY. If _you_ can, please try it out and tell us all. - Moshe Braner Anybody knows the status of MINIX/ST?