Author Topic: Best FAT32 driver settings  (Read 13115 times)

Valery Sedletski

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Re: Best FAT32 driver settings
« Reply #15 on: February 11, 2018, 10:28:36 am »
2David Graser: Ok, so it looks like the problem was with icons. Indeed, in FC/2, with no GUI, I don't observe any delays or waits to populate the directory.

BTW, I also uploaded new version r333, where I removed OBJ_ANY in DosAllocMem (which prevented CHKDSK to start), so now CHKDSK should work ok.

Also, in last versions (it was in November), I added new cool feature: now fat32.ifs can mount FS images, laying on any other file system. The images can be simple diskette images, RAW harddisk images (partition images, or whole hard disk images), VM images (e.g., VPC images, now readonly, yet). Supported VM image formats are Raw/bochs/cloop/dmg/vpc/vmdk/parallels/vvfat/qcow. I ported the image access library from QEMU, you just use the f32mount.exe utility, to mount them. Now cachef32.exe contains code to read sectors from VM images. The IFS calls cachef32.exe, to read sectors, so that, the code for reading images is run in a usermode process. You can mount images like this:

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f32mount win98.dsk <directory on a FAT drive>

-- this will mount a diskette image, or,

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f32mount win98.vhd dir1 /p:1

-- this will mount a win98.vhd VPC image to dir1 subdirectory, "/p:1" selects a primary partition in this HDD image. Numbers 1-4 specify primary partitions, 5-... specify logical partitions. Also, you can specify an optional header size as "/o:<size>", if your filesystem starts at offset <size> from the beginning of the image. "/p:..." and "/o:..." options can be combined, if you have a header before the partition table. Note that such way, you can mount any FAT12/FTA16/FAT32/exFAT partition image to a subdirectory on another FAT12/FAT16/FAT32/exFAT drive.

Also, (this feature is unfinished and alpha-quality, yet) you can mount an image to a subdirectory, and run CHKDSK/FORMAT against the mountpoint. To specify a mountpoint, you use the following syntax:

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chkdsk d: /m:<path to mountpoint> [/f]

So, d: will be ignored, and <path to mountpoint> will be checked instead. It is done this way, because you cannot pass a directory to chkdsk/format (only a driveletter), so we pass a directory as a separate parameter, instead. And likewise, for format (the same "/m:..." parameter). But I don't recommend to use format on a mountpoint this time, yet, because this feature is not finished, and it can corrupt the image.

Does anybody want to try these features? ;)
« Last Edit: February 11, 2018, 10:33:12 am by Valery Sedletski »