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32-bit MSDOS (Announce)

posted by kerravon E-mail, Ligao, Free World North, 14.10.2021, 04:37

> > I assume that CHS and LBA are mutually exclusive?
>
> Not at all. You simply use the LBA detection int 13 call and if that is
> positive, you are allowed to use LBA style disk access. You can always
> stick to CHS, but of course CHS has the added complexity that the same LBA
> sector can have different CHS locations depending on how your current
> geometry is arranged, for example based on your BIOS CMOS settings. But of
> course there also is an int 13 call to query the current CHS geometry :-)
Thanks for your message full of information.

I think this knowledge needs to be encoded in
C90 code.

Note that PDOS/386 is now able to run the gccwin
C compiler, so it is now a mini Windows development
environment. Self-contained download is now available
from http://pdos.org

That is basically proof of concept done.

And that has now been extended to comms too. You
can see how I drive COM1 to access a news server
using pure C90 code, here:

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.c/c/bYF6sl6z-MI

I think a sensible goal at this stage would be for
PDOS/386 to boot on every, or at least, most,
80386-based computers. Sort of with the goal that
the right geek will be sitting in front of an
obscure computer, boot PDOS as more-or-less the
only OS that actually works, and then proceed to
fix an important bug in PDOS.

What was theoretically possible with an 80386
processor? It could have been married to what
BIOS and hard disk? (ie I am looking for very
old configurations)

So starting from the MBR, and working within the
512-byte limitation (including FAT-32 restrictions),
what should have been done, with the benefit of
hindsight?

Thanks. Paul.

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