mbeck@wheaties.ai.mit.edu (Mark Becker) (03/19/90)
Hello * There was a discussion on the net about SYSID 4.7 shortly after it was available from the SIMTEL20 archives. I didn't save a copy of that discussion and it has since expired off this system. Does anyone have a summary? I am having problems getting SYSID 4.7 to display partition tables. Configuration: PC-Clone, MS-DOS 3.21, 1 MByte RAM, Turbo Pascal 5.5, Turbo-Debugger, two hard drives, each with two partitions. Problem: SYSID 4.7, after a long wait, outputs a message indicating there are no hard drives in the system. Investigation to Date: I have traced the problem to the pair of ioctl's in getpart(). INT 21h AX=440Dh does the Right Thing for CL=60h (get device parameters) but seems to malfunction weird for CL=61h (read logical device block). The drives recalibrate several times then out pops an error. Added code to parse the extended error code: Sector not found, media error, abort after cleanup, and 'disk error'. This doesn't make much sense to me; that area, especially of the boot drive, has been in use for two years now. Maybe the arguments aren't in the right order? (To the knowledgeable ones out there: For CL=61h the byte at offset 0 of the parameter block is supposed to be zero. But SYSID 4.7 has it set to 04h. What is this byte really supposed to do? Also, is this one of those infrequent cases where byte order is supposed to be reversed for some arguments?) Pointers appreciated. Save net.bandwidth: Use E-mail. If sufficient interest, I'll summarize to the group(s). Mark Becker mbeck@ai.mit.edu -- +-----------------------------------------------+-----------------------+ | Mark Becker | .signature under | | Internet: mbeck@ai.mit.edu | construction | +-----------------------------------------------+-----------------------+