17 Jun
2006
17 Jun
'06
6:25 a.m.
On 6/17/2006 at 8:07 AM Nico de Jong wrote:
One of my conversion systems,
http://www.farumdata.dk/uk/enserv.asp , runs
as Windows 2000 or DOS 3.something. The DOS is used only for accessing the
Irwin Rhomat drive (connected to the floppy controller as drive B), as I
cant get it to work under Windows.
Could the thing you mentioned above, be the reason for it ?
Almost certainly. Win2K/NT/XP has a very lame VDD to convert some simple
port accesses to diskette driver commands, but it doesn't try very hard.
When we offer our conversion software for 2K/XP, we have a special
kernel-mode device driver to handle it. This is also the reason that you
can't read a floppy under XP/2K if it doesn't have a DOS boot sector on
it--the floppy driver actually reads the boot sector to figure out how it
should set things up.
A better VDD for Windows might help 16-bit programs that attempt to
directly access the FDC, but it would do nothing for 32-bit programs.
Cheers,
Chuck