DOS ain't dead

When searching about DOS partition / data alignment on a SSD I found this relative new tool http://ysbits.net/ysddt that should take a care about proper disk structures /data alignment when creating DOS partitions. Simple alignment start of partition (as e.g. Gparted do) is not enough. This tool should use reserved sectors number in EPB to tune aligned data start taking in cound the size of FATs and rootdir.

Does anybody else take a care? What tools do you use?
AFAIK Free Fdisk doesn't offer such options?

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

Hm, the webpage also offers the bug fixed versions of disk caching drivers UHDD and UIDE. And what is even more noteworty is the fact that it comes with source code. As far I remember these drivers were always distrubuted without source code.

---
DOS-u-akbar!

> Hm, the webpage also offers the bug fixed versions of disk caching drivers
> UHDD and UIDE. And what is even more noteworty is the fact that it comes
> with source code. As far I remember these drivers were always distrubuted
> without source code.

Some versions are closed source, others are not.

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos...able/html/en/drivers/uide/20250410.1/index.html

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos...able/html/en/drivers/uhdd/20250410.1/index.html

please generate a diff and share it on the mailing list or here if the UHDD and UIDE shipped with FreeDOS have a bug that got fixed by that YSDDT person. Thank you!

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FreeDOS / DOSEMU2 / ...

> > Hm, the webpage also offers the bug fixed versions of disk caching
> drivers
> > UHDD and UIDE. And what is even more noteworty is the fact that it comes
> > with source code. As far I remember these drivers were always
> distrubuted
> > without source code.
>
> Some versions are closed source, others are not.

There have been many renames and changes over the years, so I honestly don't keep track of them all. (Jack has gone closed source three times over many years. He tried to coerce FreeDOS to remove all mirrored old copies too, but that didn't happen.) I don't personally see the point of using his closed source drivers, and now that the BIOS/CSM is long dead, probably few besides us even care.

Johnson Lam's website still lists 1-Jul-22 as last update to the closed source drivers (XHDD, XDVD2, XMGR, RDISK).

It also says this:

> 19-Aug-2025
>
> Bad news! Author Jack Ellis was disconnected from Internet
> due to personal health reason, since his email stop working,
> there's no way to contact him. I wish sometimes later he can
> contact me when back online.

But I don't recommend interacting with him.

> > 19-Aug-2025
> >
> > Bad news! Author Jack Ellis was disconnected from Internet
> > due to personal health reason, since his email stop working,
> > there's no way to contact him. I wish sometimes later he can
> > contact me when back online.

Bad news indeed :-o Best wishes for Jack, I hope he gets well soon!

> AFAIK Free Fdisk doesn't offer such options?

Free FDISK offers the EXPERIMENTAL ALIGN_4K option, which aligns the start of partitions. This is however not enough. The important thing is that the data clusters are aligned to 4K (which implies they are at least 4K in size). It is the job of the format utility to make sure that this is the case. FreeDOS FORMAT to my knowledge cannot do this automatically. You could do this manually though by adjusting the reserved sector count etc. for a partition with appropriate cluster size. But I think we agree that this is a pain in the a...

Even if everything is aligned nicely for 4K, I think this is worthless under DOS, as we are still accessing the disks on a 512 byte per sector basis through the usual INT13 calls (not considering potential BIOS disk access "optimizations"). Nevertheless, the firmware of every decent SSD should handle this gracefully, so I do not think this is something we have to worry about. If at all, aligning the data clusters should become relevant when an operating system is involved that is able to actually perform non-512 byte sector reads...

> > AFAIK Free Fdisk doesn't offer such options?
>
> Free FDISK offers the EXPERIMENTAL ALIGN_4K option, which aligns the start
> of partitions. This is however not enough. The important thing is that the
> data clusters are aligned to 4K (which implies they are at least 4K in
> size). It is the job of the format utility to make sure that this is the
> case. FreeDOS FORMAT to my knowledge cannot do this automatically. You
> could do this manually though by adjusting the reserved sector count etc.
> for a partition with appropriate cluster size. But I think we agree that
> this is a pain in the a...

My bootimg script uses NASM to create a file system image. It supports two relevant options: _ALIGNDATA and _MBR_ADD_GAP_TO_ALIGN. They're used to align the data start relative to the partition start or relative to the MBR here. As you suggest this is done by adding to the reserved sectors of the file system.

---
l

> I don't personally see the point of using his
> closed source drivers, and now that the BIOS/CSM is long dead, probably few
> besides us even care.

I still use his XHDD driver than can handle VDMA problem on my GB P67 MB, older versions of UDMA/UIDE don't work in V86 mode properly (don't have boot mode) so I can't use them.

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

I tried YSDDT.EXE but it hanged at disk detection phase. It crashes JEMM and without JEMM it just hangs. I found that -biosidentify- helps but not sure how it is important, if the utility gets all needed info then. It reports my partition is propely aligned including data beginning, so OK...


YSDDT.EXE v+
YSDDT v0.1.2 [25.09.2024] (c) YS
HDD#0 Max C/H/S = 1023/239/63  Ext Max C/H/S = 16382/15/63
Drive:UNKNOWN TYPE
ATAIO:1F0h.3F6h.dev0.irq14
Model:SamsungSSD840PROSeries  Rev:DXM06B0Q  S/N:***
HDD#0 > biosidentify ...
Jemm386: exception 0D occured at CS:EIP=C000:0000FFFF, ERRC=00000000
SS:ESP=9FC0:00000404 EBP=00AFFFFF EFL=00037086 CR0=80000011 CR4=00000650
EAX=9FC0FFFF EBX=01000007 ECX=46B8FFFF EDX=3136FFFF ESI=000DFFFF EDI=0001FFFF
DS=FFFF ES=FFFF FS=2156 GS=D943 [CS:IP]=7C 00 6C 38 7C 40 38 04
Press ESC to abort program


---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> Free FDISK offers the EXPERIMENTAL ALIGN_4K option, which aligns the start
> of partitions. This is however not enough. The important thing is that the
> data clusters are aligned to 4K (which implies they are at least 4K in
> size). It is the job of the format utility to make sure that this is the
> case. FreeDOS FORMAT to my knowledge cannot do this automatically. You
> could do this manually though by adjusting the reserved sector count etc.
> for a partition with appropriate cluster size. But I think we agree that
> this is a pain in the a...
>
> Even if everything is aligned nicely for 4K, I think this is worthless
> under DOS, as we are still accessing the disks on a 512 byte per sector
> basis through the usual INT13 calls (not considering potential BIOS disk
> access "optimizations"). Nevertheless, the firmware of every decent SSD
> should handle this gracefully, so I do not think this is something we have
> to worry about. If at all, aligning the data clusters should become
> relevant when an operating system is involved that is able to actually
> perform non-512 byte sector reads...

It depends on whether you're talking about DOS in general or FreeDOS specifically. The MS-DOS kernel can handle sector sizes other than 512 bytes, and I think some others can also (like PC-DOS). I'm also not sure about any of the DOS disk utility programs (FDISK, FORMAT, CHKDSK, etc.).

> It depends on whether you're talking about DOS in general or FreeDOS
> specifically.

It is more about the DOS most likely using the BIOS to access the hard disk. A EDD3 specification draft (you find it under the name d1572r3-EDD3.pdf) states for the non-LBA access functions that "sector sizes shall be exactly 512 bytes". Albeit this is a draft, I never encountered a different sector size (for hard disks!). I am not sure what the situation regarding the extended disk access routines INT13.4x is. At least INT13.48 seems to expose the physical geometry of the disk. The document makes no statement regarding sector size for these functions. So it MIGHT be that these functions work on the physical sector size of the hard disk, but it MIGHT also be that there is a 512-byte emulation involved. For CDs the document clearly states that the sector size is 2048 bytes: "INT 13 Functions 41h-49h shall access the CD or DVD using non-emulated sector LBA’s in the native sector size
of the CD or DVD". Regarding the draft 1572, I was not able to find out whether there was an official release of this document.

So far for the INT13. Might be a different story when using custom DOS device drivers interacting on a more direct way with the hardware. How does your USBDRIVE handle this? Is it able to handle non-512 BPS devices? And if it is, how does it present such kind of device to the operating system?

I tried the fata (align) option and it seems to work as expected. It created reserved sectors before FATs to align data start and it moved the existing data partition without loss.

BTW how important is CHS values matching to LBA values in the partition table? Is there some tool that automatically recalc CHS from LBA values in partition table? And what CHS values should be set for partitions beyond 8,4GB? Is there some rule of thumb or it doesn't matter in any way? It seems that tools like Gparted, when set to LBA alignment, it calculates some CHS address that of course then doesn't align to CHS and some old DOS partitioning programs like PQ magic complains. BTW CHS geometry of drives also may vary. My SSD reports 240 heads, 63 sectors per track under DOS while under Linux it's 255 heads and 63 SPT. My mechanical HDD has 255 heads both under DOS and Linux. This also lead me to not care about CHS much. Maybe some old DOS 3.x/4.x may complain but I use at least DOS 6.22 and 7.1.

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> BTW how important is CHS values matching to LBA values in the partition
> table? Is there some tool that automatically recalc CHS from LBA values in
> partition table? And what CHS values should be set for partitions beyond
> 8,4GB? Is there some rule of thumb or it doesn't matter in any way?

In case cylinder > 1023 there are basically three possibilities:

a) calculate a "virtual" cylinder > 1023 based on the disk geometry and write the value modulo 1024 into the MBR
b) write a marker value as CHS, typically something like 1023/254/63
c) write total garbage

Free FDISK does a) by default, but via config option may be instructed to do b).

For partitions where cyl <= 1023, the CHS / LBA values should agree. But most tools use the LBA values. This should also be safer in case the drive is transferred between different systems, as the systems might disagree about the drive geometry.

ok, seems the rule that:

Indication of LBA Usage:
When a partition starts beyond the range addressable by CHS (i.e., beyond the first 1024 cylinders), the CHS fields are set to their maximum values.

Btw I tried to manually create a primary partition that started at CHS 0, 8, 1 (LBA 504 that is 4k aligned) and CHS 1, 0, 1 but PQ magic still complained with error 105 or 110, so I don't try fit CHS alignment...

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

MS-DOS v4 to v6 (and v7 in CHS mode) have to know the CHS geometry, and it may have to match what's found in MBR/EPBR/BPB.

> Btw I tried to manually create a primary partition that started at CHS 0,
> 8, 1 (LBA 504 that is 4k aligned) and CHS 1, 0, 1 but PQ magic still
> complained with error 105 or 110, so I don't try fit CHS alignment...

For my tests and the bootimg/partdisk.asm script I found that the most compatible thing is to start primary and logical partitions on a head boundary (CHS x:y:1), start extended partitions on a cylinder boundary (CHS x:0:1), and end all partitions on a cylinder boundary (CHS x:H-1:S).

Quoting from my sources: https://hg.pushbx.org/ecm/bootimg/file/340b7e5286d4/partdisk.asm#l51

> Size is rounded up to the next full sector. Further, partitions are always placed so that their start is on a head boundary (for primary and logical partitions) or so that their start is on a cylinder boundary (for extended partitions). Moreover, the size is always rounded up so that any partition ends on a cylinder boundary. (Extended partitions of type 5 must start on a cylinder boundary for MS-DOS v4 to v7 at least because their UPBs contain an amount of hidden sector within the innermost extended partition and a cylinder adjustment that is added in only after calculating the CHS from the LBA number.)

---
l

> It also says this:
>
> > 19-Aug-2025
> >
> > Bad news! Author Jack Ellis was disconnected from Internet
> > due to personal health reason, since his email stop working,
> > there's no way to contact him. I wish sometimes later he can
> > contact me when back online.
>
> But I don't recommend interacting with him.

Reading Johnson's message, you might think it's something relatively recent, but it's been almost three years since then. As someone who interacted with Jack quite a bit, I doubt he is still in this world.

---
Glory to God for all things

> > It also says this:
> >
> > > 19-Aug-2025
> > >
> > > Bad news! Author Jack Ellis was disconnected from Internet
> > > due to personal health reason, since his email stop working,
> > > there's no way to contact him. I wish sometimes later he can
> > > contact me when back online.
> >
> > But I don't recommend interacting with him.
>
> Reading Johnson's message, you might think it's something relatively
> recent, but it's been almost three years since then. As someone who
> interacted with Jack quite a bit, I doubt he is still in this world.

It has not been 3 years since 19-Aug-2025, or am I misunderstanding something here?

---
FreeDOS / DOSEMU2 / ...

> It has not been 3 years since 19-Aug-2025, or am I misunderstanding
> something here?

In November 2022 he could still communicate, but by Christmas he could no longer do so, and in January his E-Mail "stopped working". Based on the knowledge I have, I have serious doubts that anyone has been able to communicate with him via the Internet since at least the end of December 2022.

---
Glory to God for all things

> > It has not been 3 years since 19-Aug-2025, or am I misunderstanding
> > something here?
>
> In November 2022 he could still communicate, but by Christmas he could no
> longer do so, and in January his E-Mail "stopped working". Based on the
> knowledge I have, I have serious doubts that anyone has been able to
> communicate with him via the Internet since at least the end of December
> 2022.
Yet you have no personal knowledge of his passing? Is there any obituary for a Jack R. Ellis? I do see one for a Jack Richard Ellis 1941-2025.

> Yet you have no personal knowledge of his passing? Is there any obituary
> for a Jack R. Ellis? I do see one for a Jack Richard Ellis 1941-2025.

The obituary you mention is about another person. I haven't seen any obituary and there has been no one to get the information from, but taking into account everything I know about the situation I doubt that he is still alive.

---
Glory to God for all things

> > It depends on whether you're talking about DOS in general or FreeDOS
> > specifically.
>
> It is more about the DOS most likely using the BIOS to access the hard
> disk. A EDD3 specification draft (you find it under the name
> d1572r3-EDD3.pdf) states for the non-LBA access functions that "sector
> sizes shall be exactly 512 bytes". Albeit this is a draft, I never
> encountered a different sector size (for hard disks!). I am not sure what
> the situation regarding the extended disk access routines INT13.4x is. At
> least INT13.48 seems to expose the physical geometry of the disk. The
> document makes no statement regarding sector size for these functions. So
> it MIGHT be that these functions work on the physical sector size of the
> hard disk, but it MIGHT also be that there is a 512-byte emulation
> involved. For CDs the document clearly states that the sector size is 2048
> bytes: "INT 13 Functions 41h-49h shall access the CD or DVD using
> non-emulated sector LBA’s in the native sector size
> of the CD or DVD". Regarding the draft 1572, I was not able to find out
> whether there was an official release of this document.
>
> So far for the INT13. Might be a different story when using custom DOS
> device drivers interacting on a more direct way with the hardware. How does
> your USBDRIVE handle this? Is it able to handle non-512 BPS devices? And if
> it is, how does it present such kind of device to the operating system?

USBDrive does several things. It is important to remember that USBDRIVE is installed as a TSR _after_ the system has booted so cannot change things that are configured while booting. This includes the maximum bytes-per-sector. The maximum bytes per sector value for DOS is stored in the List of Lists (LOL). The way MS-DOS works is that the default/original value stored in the LOL is 128 (it's not even 512). As MS-DOS is booting, it changes this value dynamically as it detects disks/partitions and assigns drive letters. Most of the time, of course, it changes from 128 to 512. That value also affects other things configured while booting, such as how BUFFERS work.

In MS-DOS, the disks detected and assigned drive letters during booting include any "special" disk drivers installed in CONFIG.SYS which can include things like RAM disks. I install a RAM disk in CONFIG.SYS which has a 2k sector size and MS-DOS handles the rest of the details automatically. You can also modify the DOS kernel to change the default value of 128 to something else (like 2048), which I have done but find that installing a RAM disk is easier. The RAM disk installation will fail if it's using a DOS that's incompatible with larger sectors.

As part of the boot sector of all drives (even if they aren't bootable they still have a boot sector) there is a BIOS Parameter Block (BPB) structure that contains the bytes-per-sector value for the disk. The BPB is on the disk and is also transferred back and forth through the disk device driver mechanism that DOS uses to access and control disks. So the actual bytes-per-sector size of a disk is not "hidden" and there really isn't a _valid_ reason to assume it's always 512.

USBDrive supports "plug and play" of disks, so while installing USBDrive looks at and remembers the value stored in the LOL and won't assign a drive letter to a disk with a sector size that the DOS can't support. But it still allows INT 13h functions to access the disk directly. This would allow a special disk driver (that bypasses the kernel) to access the disk. Something similar happens if USBDrive detects an incompatible file system on the disk (e.g., if it detects FAT32 on a disk where the DOS only supports FAT12/FAT16 or detects exFAT on a disk since AFAIK there is no DOS at all that natively supports exFAT). USBDrive always allows INT 13h access to all disks even if the aren't assigned any drive letters.

To assign drive letters, USBDrive fills in various internal DOS tables, some of which include the bytes-per-sector value. In addition to the BIOS Parameter Block (BPB) and device driver functions, there is also a data structure in DOS called the Disk Parameter Block which contains the bytes-per-sector value for the disk.

The INT 13h extended functions (41h-49h) also allow access to large disks and disks with large sectors sizes, and return data that the "regular" INT 13h functions don't include. USBDrive supports both the original and extended INT 13h functions.

I've also experimented with mounting CD/DVD/BD's (which all natively have 2k sector sizes). I've successfully mounted a USB-attached DVD-RAM (with a 2k sector size) formatted with FAT32 _natively_ into MS-DOS and was able to read and write (much like a REALLY big floppy drive). I formatted the DVD-RAM with FAT32 using Windows (I think it was an older version of Windows since I'm not sure newer versions will do it, and I don't think there's a DOS FORMAT anywhere that will do it, and DVD-RAM media is really hard to find these days). I'm also trying to experiment with formatting "regular" CD/DVD/BD's (not DVD-RAMs) with FAT32 and maybe even dividing them into partitions to see if that will work. I don't know if something like that will be very useful, but I think it should be possible. The way I insert data into the DOS tables the kernel doesn't know how the disk is actually being accessed.

Well, my resulting FAT16 partition, CHS start aligned to head bound (not end), LBA start at 1008 that is 8k aligned. FAT and data aligned via YSDDT (by 16 rsvd sec.):

p0.0.0:*t06       1008-   4194303    0/ 16/ 1 -  277/ 96/16 =4193296   
fatSectorBytes=512  fatClusterBytes=32768  fatClusterSectors=64 (32k) 
fatSectors=4193296  fatReservedSectors=16  fatHiddenSectors=1008       
FAT16  fatFats=2  fatFatSectors=256  fatClustersInSectorFAT=256       
FAT16  fatRootFiles=1024  fatRootSectors=64  fatRootCluster=0         
FAT16  fatSerial=********  fatLabel='SSD_BOOT      '  fatType='FAT16   ' 
FAT16  fatOEM='MSWIN4.1'  fatHeads/Sectors=240/63  fatDrive=80               
FAT#0  FAT sector  16  HDD sector 1024: 32k aligned                   
FAT#1  FAT sector 272  HDD sector 1280: 32k aligned                   
ROOT   FAT sector 528  HDD sector 1536: 32k aligned                   
FILES  FAT sector 592  HDD sector 1600: 32k aligned                   
FILES take Clusters = 65511  Sectors after end = 0                     
FAT  gives Clusters = 65534 (unused 23)  Sectors after end = 0 (*2)   
fatSectorMin=1  fatSectorMax=4193295 fatSectorMaxAlign=4193295 (-0)   
hddSectorMin=1009  hddSectorMax=4194303 hddSectorMaxAlign=4194303     


---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

Sad to read this, btw how old was he?
I mailed with him last 31.5.2018 to xe***@earthlink.net

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> Sad to read this, btw how old was he?
> I mailed with him last 31.5.2018 to xe***@earthlink.net

As long as I am not absolutely certain of his demise I don't allow myself to answer that question, but it's about a fairly advanced age.

---
Glory to God for all things

BTW did you investigated USB XHCI/OHCI to add support for a bit newer MBs to your USB drivers?

I also used DVD-RAMs media in the past but some years ago I found they turned bad way - I still can read them but writting went extremelly slow and usually fails then. Also formatting whole disc fails sooner or after an hour. I tried 7 different DVD drived and none was able finish formatting so I suppose media degradation. As I just looked to out local PC stores they don't sell DVD-RAM anymore. One viable option for longterm backups could be M-Disc archival BR medias (25/50/100GB) that are still offered. But I see that choice of internal BR writer drives shrinked to just one Asus model - probably rebranded LG. Seems optical medias are dead...

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> > Sad to read this, btw how old was he?
> > I mailed with him last 31.5.2018 to xe***@earthlink.net
>
> As long as I am not absolutely certain of his demise I don't allow myself
> to answer that question, but it's about a fairly advanced age.

IIRC, he was almost 70 in 2015, so he would be roughly 80 now.
But I also remember that he was born after WW2 (which he never stops talking about).

With all due respect, he was a very obsessive and extremely angry person. In particular, his anger over the war shouldn't have carried over to 2007 here on BTTR, much less 2015 (yes, his private email insulting me, which I ignored, was all WW2-related insults). People half his age aren't interested in his old grudges. I don't think I ever shared that email. Granted, it wasn't that bad, just the typical jerk calling someone N*zi and H*tl*r. (I'm not even German, sheesh.) Pure looney tune nonsense, so I just ignored it since he'd already "given up". So his getting back on the mailing list just to brag about going closed source (and directly blaming me) was beyond irrational.

He was impossible to deal with, directly emailing me and Jim to help him get back on the SF.net mailing lists, but he refused even what the Bug Ticket guy told him to do. He was constantly unsubscribing to avoid "dealing with fools" but also refused to let anyone else announce for him. There was nothing I could do, though I tried giving workarounds. And he had way too many revisions of his "drivers", so the whole blasted WIP version didn't even boot for me anymore. I even told him that (later), but he still seemed to misunderstand. Even screenshots taken later to prove that fact didn't fully alleviate his animosity. The partial bug fixes to the "old" open source drivers was meager, and his going closed source a third time was just validation to me that he isn't worth wasting time on. He used to have version checks against even working on FreeDOS, so I don't know why anybody would trust or even want to waste time on his "new" drivers. If he hasn't stabilized by now, he's never going to.

Seriously, I'm no GPL zealot. While I prefer open source personally, I never waged any kind of license wars. But the GPL does (mostly) prevent vindictive and dishonest people like this from hijacking projects due to irrational hatred.

Hi Rugxulo, I do not think that this is the time or place to express in such verbosity that you did not get along with him. I think we can agree that he is (or was?) old and not easy to negotiate with, but we can still wish him to get well. We do not actually know his status, maybe Johnson does, maybe not even he does.

PS: Jacks software experience started back in 1966. He should be around 80 now.

> Hi Rugxulo, I do not think that this is the time or place to express in
> such verbosity that you did not get along with him. I think we can agree
> that he is (or was?) old and not easy to negotiate with, but we can still
> wish him to get well. We do not actually know his status, maybe Johnson
> does, maybe not even he does.

+1

---
Forum admin

> With all due respect, he was a very obsessive and extremely angry person.

[snip]

Understood. And now let it go.

---
Forum admin

> It depends on whether you're talking about DOS in general or FreeDOS
> specifically. The MS-DOS kernel can handle sector sizes other than 512
> bytes, and I think some others can also (like PC-DOS). I'm also not sure
> about any of the DOS disk utility programs (FDISK, FORMAT, CHKDSK, etc.).

I mean, PC DOS *is* MS-DOS in almost every way that matters (and in EVERY way that matters from 3.2 until 5.00.1)...

> > I don't personally see the point of using his
> > closed source drivers, and now that the BIOS/CSM is long dead, probably
> > few besides us even care.
>
> I still use his XHDD driver than can handle VDMA problem on my GB P67 MB,
> older versions of UDMA/UIDE don't work in V86 mode properly (don't have
> boot mode) so I can't use them.

If I may steer the conversation back to technical topics ....

I don't fault you for trying, but what OS is this you're using? FreeDOS? MS-DOS? Win98SE?

V86 mode? As in EMM386 (JEMMEX) or Windows? I assume that's for getting more UMBs free to conserve memory.

I don't expect you to test every possible setup, but I am curious.

> > > Sad to read this, btw how old was he?
> > > I mailed with him last 31.5.2018 to xe***@earthlink.net
> >
> > As long as I am not absolutely certain of his demise I don't allow
> myself
> > to answer that question, but it's about a fairly advanced age.
>
> IIRC, he was almost 70 in 2015, so he would be roughly 80 now.
> But I also remember that he was born after WW2 (which he never stops
> talking about).
>
> With all due respect, he was a very obsessive and extremely angry person.[...]

I knew him as a kind and very polite man, it is true that he tended to take offense quite easily, but not as easily as countless individuals do today, who do not possess even a fraction of the positive qualities he had. "IIRC", once when he got angry with you, he asked me to send you an E-Mail explaining what exactly in your comments had offended him (to be honest, I would have felt offended too if I were him, although I probably wouldn't have responded the way he did), but perhaps you don't remember that, or at least so it seems. Anyway, I decided to reply to your message just so that those who didn't have the opportunity to chat with him wouldn't somehow imagine that he was indeed "the typical jerk" you describe, no, he wasn't like that at all, in fact he was a rational, educated and well-mannered man, in a way that, unfortunately, you rarely encounter nowadays.

---
Glory to God for all things

> I think we can agree that he is (or was?) old and not easy to negotiate with.

I don't know what you exactly mean by "not easy to negotiate with", he was always open to the arguments of others when they were presented in a form he considered to be "respectful", but he had "a little bit" different notions of what means "respectful" and "disrespectful" comparing to many of our contemporaries, whose mentality he deeply detested.

---
Glory to God for all things

By the way, I used to chat frequently with Jack for over 15 years, from 2007 to 2022, so I think that I knew him much better than Rugxulo with their "selective" memories did.

---
Glory to God for all things

> By the way, I used to chat frequently with Jack for over 15 years, from
> 2007 to 2022,

Jack's anger almost ruined this forum in 2007. Yes, I too was here interacting with him back then. Even then he was raging.

He was a former Jew (now Episcopalian since 1979?, thus his mother disowned him, and he was angry at his sister). Some of his relatives died in the Holocaust. So there stems his anger at Germany and German people (which should be irrelevant to all of us half his age).

> so I think that I knew him much better than Rugxulo with
> their "selective" memories did.

He carbon-copied that insulting email (May 16, 2015) to both you and Johnson Lam, subject: "Your 4-Apr-2015 Message to "Zangune" of SourceForge." So yes you do know his irrational behavior.

The irony is that I was shocked at his animosity, so I ignored it and never (until now) shared it with anyone. Don't say Jack was kind. He was psychotic.

We have many German contributors to FreeDOS: Robert, Andreas (Japheth), E. C. Masloch, (Bernd?) Boeckmann, Ralf Quint, Tom Ehlert, Willy / Fritz, Eric Auer, probably others.

You should know by now that he initially emailed me and Jim Hall directly to help him (2014), but neither of us worked for SourceForge, so there was nothing we could do to help him. They don't take policy advice from non-paying users like us. The Zangune guy at SF.net told him to upgrade to a newer (free) web browser, but Jack refused to try anything. The irony is that he still (somehow?) got back on the mailing list and was abusive to me, refused to stop, so he got banned.

Don't say he was kind. You have a copy of that email.

> Who in F***ING HELL are YOU -- Ad*lf H*TL*R
> And yes, I do call them "FleaDOS"

> does NOT require that I deal with anything as fractious as
> the current open-source "community", which I believe is as
> PATHETIC a bunch of N*ZIS as the real ones were!

> "S**g H**L!", mein Herr!
> Among the WORST total A**HOLES in history - H*tl*r might have been PROUD of them!!

All because he refused to stay subscribed to the mailing list or upgrade to a free web browser because he also refused to upgrade his OS. He wouldn't even create a secondary (free) email account just for FreeDOS either. There were solutions, workarounds, but he refused them all.

You don't think that's quite the overreaction from him?? Even on a technical level he was wrong (in my case). You think that's fair??

Please do not defend Jack. He had major anger problems, to say the least.

I can already guess that Robert wants to lock this thread.

> I knew him as a kind and very polite man, it is true that he tended to take
> offense quite easily, but not as easily as countless individuals do today,

He took offense to me (literally) telling someone else here that "the drivers may not work at all anymore" (didn't boot at all for me, a regression, but here's a direct download link, try it yourself).

> who do not possess even a fraction of the positive qualities he had.

Ridiculous. Even if his drivers were bug-free (they weren't!), he doesn't have the right to lord it over others or devalue them.

> "IIRC", once when he got angry with you, he asked me to send you an E-Mail
> explaining what exactly in your comments had offended him (to be honest, I
> would have felt offended too if I were him, although I probably wouldn't
> have responded the way he did), but perhaps you don't remember that, or at
> least so it seems.

You mean the Nov. 2021 post here, forwarding his response, that I censored? The one where he's just willy-nilly calling people "A**HOLES" and "FleaDOS" and "BLOW IT OUT YOUR A**" over and over again?

I don't personally believe it's free speech to only constantly insult people. Your signature here says "glory to God", but God says, "All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice." (Ephesians 4:31). It's annoying to try to help people but instead be insulted for it.

> Anyway, I decided to reply to your message just so that
> those who didn't have the opportunity to chat with him wouldn't somehow
> imagine that he was indeed "the typical jerk" you describe

I literally said "the typical jerk calling someone N*zi and H*tl*r". That behavior is not educated, godly, or rational.

> no, he wasn't like that at all, in fact he was a rational, educated
> and well-mannered man, in a way that, unfortunately, you rarely encounter nowadays.

While I don't wish him bad health, and I can pray for him, I am indeed glad that we stopped communicating because it was not fruitful. He was neither kind nor just nor honest. It's just not fair to punish others at FreeDOS unfairly and scapegoat me. But again, what little benefit his drivers had, they weren't crucial. Sorry, not sorry, but I don't need them. Good riddance to his forced drama.

Rugxulo, I generally don't like to comment on such things, but your responses alone show that you are much more resentful than you think and claim he was. Leave Jack wherever he is and stop counting his mistakes, count your own, for each person is accountable for their own.

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Glory to God for all things

> > By the way, I used to chat frequently with Jack for over 15 years, from
> > 2007 to 2022,
>
> Jack's anger almost ruined this forum in 2007. Yes, I too was here
> interacting with him back then. Even then he was raging.
>
> He was a former Jew (now Episcopalian since 1979?, thus his mother disowned
> him, and he was angry at his sister). Some of his relatives died in the
> Holocaust. So there stems his anger at Germany and German people (which
> should be irrelevant to all of us half his age). [...]

The mere fact that you expose such private matters reveals your character.

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Glory to God for all things

Admin here: Please stop responding to Khusraw's posts about Jack's personality. Different people had different experiences with Jack. That's how life often is. If you feel the need to discuss this further with Khusraw, please do so via private email. So let's come back to technical discussion now or I will lock this thread.

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Forum admin

Admin here: Please stop responding to Rugxulo's posts about Jack's personality. Different people had different experiences with Jack. That's how life often is. If you feel the need to discuss this further with Rugxulo, please do so via private email. So let's come back to technical discussion now or I will lock this thread.

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Forum admin

I probably wrote about that problem many years ago on this forum and currently don't remember the details. But the problem on my MB was invariant to DOS and EMM/JEMM version. It caused thad when I load EMM and standard version of UDMA/UIDE/XIDE the system hang soon at disk access, usually during autoexec yet. I consulted the problem with Jack and he though that problem is in my BIOS that don't properly handle disk DMA in V86 mode. He made for me customized driver version that loaded in two stages, first in realmode before loading EMM and installed some bootstrap and then it loaded second (main) stage after EMM loaded. This solved my hanging problem. Not sure, the problem might occur only if HDD is attached to SATA3 ports not SATA2 pots. I'm unable to boot Win98 on SATA3, I have to swich boot HDD to other disk that is connected to SATA2. I suspect there maybe some link to SATA IDE emulation (legacy mode) that may behave slightly differently on SATA2 and 3 ports...

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> BTW did you investigated USB XHCI/OHCI to add support for a bit newer MBs
> to your USB drivers?

I'm working on EHCI, but progress is VERY slow (very little time to work on these kinds of things any more).


> I also used DVD-RAMs media in the past but some years ago I found they
> turned bad way - I still can read them but writting went extremelly slow
> and usually fails then.

I'm not surprised at that. Although DVD-RAMs are writable, they have a limited number of times they can be written to. It's way more that something like a CD-RW, but nothing like a real hard drive. The problem is that every time you need to write something (even just to change the time stamp or change a file attribute) you write to the FAT area of the disk, so even though the data from the file itself may get stored in a new place the metadata doesn't move. In addition, the same sector of the disk will store the metadata for several files, so changing one file indirectly affects several other files at the same time. So a DVD-RAM would probably be OK for something like a backup (especially if you transferred it as an "image" and use Disk-At-Once instead of copying one file at a time), but you probably wouldn't actually want to treat it like a big floppy (though floppies aren't all that reliable either). The "image" backup idea is also what I'm thinking might be feasible for something like FAT32 formatted writable optical media.

>...
>
> One viable option for longterm backups could be M-Disc archival BR medias
> (25/50/100GB) that are still offered. But I see that choice of internal BR
> writer drives shrinked to just one Asus model - probably rebranded LG. Seems
> optical medias are dead...

They certainly seem to be dying, though not quite dead yet (just like DOS itself). I think your options for USB external drives will be more viable than internal optical drives. I know my USB optical drive is pretty old so I'm not even sure it supports M-discs -- I haven't used it in awhile. I know it's really hard to find new laptops with any kind of internal optical drive any more (and of course they don't have a BIOS, either).

> The problem is
> that every time you need to write something (even just to change the time
> stamp or change a file attribute) you write to the FAT area of the disk, so
> even though the data from the file itself may get stored in a new place the
> metadata doesn't move...

In my case I used UDF because of this. UDF should be optimized for RAMs with much less write amplification over FAT but of course unreadable under DOS (I remember there was some attempt to bring UDF support in DOS but never moved further)...

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.