Sellam wrote:
MS-DOS 3.3 has a limit of 512 entries in the root
directory. I have a
need to put more than this.
Hey! Weren't you one of the people complaining that cctalk isn't
a PC support forum?
Anyhow, I think you can do it if you use something other than the DOS
format command to create the filesystem. For instance, with the Linux
utility "mkdosfs", you can specify "-r root-dir-entries". The man
page
says that the default is 112 or 224 for floppies, and 512 for hard disks.
It doesn't say anything about what the upper limit might be.
I just tried it using a floppy image file rather than a real floppy
disk. I created the image file like this:
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=floppy.img bs=1024 count=1440
1440+0 records in
1440+0 records out
First I tried the default format:
$ /sbin/mkdosfs -v floppy.img
mkdosfs 2.8 (28 Feb 2001)
floppy.img has 2 heads and 18 sectors per track,
logical sector size is 512,
using 0xf0 media descriptor, with 2880 sectors;
file system has 2 12-bit FATs and 1 sector per cluster.
FAT size is 9 sectors, and provides 2847 clusters.
Root directory contains 224 slots.
Volume ID is 42489a44, no volume label.
The I tried using the "-r" option to specify more root directory
entries:
$ /sbin/mkdosfs -v -r 1024 floppy.img
mkdosfs 2.8 (28 Feb 2001)
floppy.img has 2 heads and 18 sectors per track,
logical sector size is 512,
using 0xf0 media descriptor, with 2880 sectors;
file system has 2 12-bit FATs and 1 sector per cluster.
FAT size is 9 sectors, and provides 2797 clusters.
Root directory contains 1024 slots.
Volume ID is 42489a4e, no volume label.
I don't have a real blank floppy disk handy to test, so I did the
next best thing. I mounted the image as a virtual drive A with
VMware. Windows XP sees it as a floppy just fine.
In a Linux directory that is exported as a Samba share, I created
676 files that each contain one byte:
$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=1 count=676 | split -b 1
676+0 records in
676+0 records out
In Windows, I copied the 676 files to the A drive. It worked fine.
So Windows XP apparently can deal with a floppy with a root
directory larger than 512 entries, if you can create one somehow.
If you aren't able to run the Linux mkdosfs command yourself, I can
send you a ZIP file containing an otherwise empty floppy image
created as described above, and you can use rawrite.exe or equivalent
to write it onto a real floppy disk.
Eric