M.Jones@massey.ac.nz (Michael Jones) (11/08/89)
I am sure this question has probably been asked before so send me e-mail if you can give any help, rather than clutter up this newsgroup. 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 have been testing the program on a variety of machines - an XT with 2 floppy and 2 hard drives, an AT with 2 floppy and 2 hard drives, an XT with four floppy, 1 hard, and 4 virtual network drives, and an AT with a hard drive, a ram disk, and one floppy drive). 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 # #############################################################################