DOS ain't dead

Hi,
I'm looking for some TSR utility, that can write-protect the HDD partition. It must work silently - don't report write errors and must have ability to unload.
I found 2 programs: Eric Auer's fdshield - this produce error message, and The FANTOM 2.2 - (fanram.arj) which works silently and probably would help me to pass the Win98 boot process but I need to unload it and that Fantom cannot. No sources available :(

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> Hi,
> I'm looking for some TSR utility, that can write-protect the HDD partition.

Norton Utilities 8.0 includes DISKMON (disk monitor), which claims (among other things) to be able to prevent writing to a partition. But I have never used it, never needed to use it.

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> The FANTOM 2.2 - (fanram.arj)
> which works silently and probably would help me to pass the Win98 boot
> process but I need to unload it and that Fantom cannot. No sources
> available :(

Did you forget the old MARK/RELEASE utils? Maybe they would work?

tsrcom35.zip - "tsrcom35.zip B 79761 960621 TSR memory managmt utils (MARK/RELEASE/MAPMEM)"

Did you try one of these?

hddprt2.zip
hdsentry.zip
protect.asm
protect.zip
wphd.zip
WPT.ZIP

The last two look promising, but I didn't test it.

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Forum admin

Thanks,
I chosen protect.asm as it's simple to understand and modify. I modified it to be silent on write access. The unload after Win98 boots is not so easy as I though because when a DOS window is launched and program executed again to disable it only affect environment of that one DOS window and not system in global. So as a dirty test I added a counter of dicarded writes with condition that passed all writes after reaching some count. Then I do trial-error tune of count to see how system will react. If I block more about 300 writes it booted to GUI. Unfortunately whole write protection idea proved wrong because when write access via INT13h was reenabled Win98 hanged totally. So even after esdi_506.pdr driver takes control there still seems to be INT13h accesses that kill it. So what only could help would be to patch BIOS INT13h routine to not doing any buggy DMA operations. This task going too complicated over the discomfort of booting Win98 from slave HDD on SATA2 port (where I have smaller primary partition that I cannot easily increase because of need to keep extended partition on the same HDD below 8,4GB limit for DOS 6.22). Now I feel I did tried all possibilities to fix this vDMA BIOS vs WIn98 issue. Test this carefully when you buy a new MB...

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.