On 01/30/2013 12:27 AM, John Wilson wrote:
On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 09:17:34AM -0800, Fred Cisin
wrote:
The NEC chips even have a [little used] command
to read sector header!
I'd *love* to be set straight, but I've had problems with some models of FDC
chip hanging up when given a "read ID" command. It's very useful, but
either
it can't be relied upon to work, or I'm an idiot. Or both.
No comment on that, but Read ID has been used in PC BIOSes (for example,
see bit 7 in 40:96H.) as well as many drivers (see, for instance, the
NT4/2K/XP... floppy driver routines. It's the most reliable way that
there is to determine the recorded density of a floppy. I believe that
both BSD and Linux use it as well.
Unless I miss my guess, it's also a key part of Dave Dunfield's
ImageDisk and I'm pretty certain that I wrote it into both Telediska nd
Anadisk. Without it, life would be much harder.
--Chuck