K538915@CZHRZU1A.BITNET.UUCP (02/22/87)
To hopefully end this endless discussion on use of drive C for a ramdisk,
this is what I know from experience, BIOS listing and handbooks:
- Drive C is reserved for the first partition of
the harddisk, normally desktop.inf is saved to
the root directory of the BOOT disk, except if you
have a drive C. The logic behind this is: if you
have a Harddisk you still can't officially boot
from it, to make life a bit easier for the owners
of harddisks Atari decided that if there is a drive C
(first partion of a harddisk) desktop.inf and all
....ACC files will be read from it, that's why
desktop.inf is saved to C. The problem with this kludge
is that it blurrs the destinction between what is your
bootdisk and what not: if you have a bootable harddisk
you don't need this kludge anyway, but you can't boot
from A: without TOS accessing drive C: and reading
the desk accessories from there. I hope Atari will throw
this part of the code out in the next ROM release
(if ever).
- Small c is reserved for the cartridge port. In the first
release of TOS the Install Drive item didn't capitilize
the drive letter entered and if you entered 'c' for your
RamDisk you ended up with it being called 'Cartridge'.
Simon Poole
K538915@CZHRZU1A.BITNET