Re: Ada and Hardware

["chris.danx" <chris.danx@ntlworld.com>]

> >Hello folks,
> >    I'm implementing a program which reads files on a floppy disk which are
> not
> >stored via the fat12 file system.  I know this is the most popular format
> but i
> >want a simple contigouous fs for the purposes of booting an OS.
>
> There is a lot of utilities for reading and writing DOS disks. Why change
> something which is so standardized?

I don't understand FAT12 yet, and it complicates the boot sector.  Also the fs
can be messed with if it's a fat12 disk easily.  I don't want this.  Would you
want any person coming along and swapping a driver file for another that's got a
similar signiture but does malicious things behind the scenes?  What's more
anyone can come along and delete a critical file easy.  Two clicks and OS is
gone.


> Booting from such a floppy should be well understood since there are at
> least two such systems used in conjunction with Linux and the various BSD
> varieties.

I know how to boot from a floppy for the file system i'm using.  It's really
easy (just look in 2nd inode to get address of primary kernel file, and
calculate offset).  I just need to get the files from my FAT hard disk to my BFS
floppy.  The current driver implements a disk as a file on a HD, and it's really
easy to work with.  The problem is i need to create a bfs enabled disk, write
files to it, read info from it, via an interactive shell.  I don't know how to
do this in Ada (i can do the shell though).  I do know how in C.


Chris Campbell