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FAT32 drive on GPT (Miscellaneous)

posted by boeckmann, Aachen, Germany, 31.08.2023, 14:52

> > > I have a 500GB GPT hard drive with a FAT32 drive on it. What will I
> need
> > > for DOS to see this disk? Is it possible at all?
> >
> > AFAIK any current DOS kernel doesn't support GPT.
>
> as said in 2022,
>
> http://www.drivesnapshot.de/download/kernel.sys
>
>
> should show and use existing FAT/FAT32 partitions if they are below 2TB.
>
> of course the kernel must be loaded from floppy or GRUB
>
> > Theoretically it
> > shouldn't be so hard to add such support into FreeDOS, it would need
> only
> > some minimal parsing of GPT to find FAT16/32 and read the LBA offset
> where
> > the partition starts.
> even practically it took no more then ~2 hours of work to implement this.
>
>
> > Alsou you coud save this troubles using hybrid MBR/GPT scheme as your
> disk
> > size is below 2TB...
>
> it's MUCH better to have a kernel that supports GPT partitioning natively.
Are there any plans to incorporate this into the official Kernel? I did not find a hint of this in the Github Kernel repo, but guess you modified initdisk.c to scan for partitions on GPT.

What is your strategy regarding enumerating the drive letters? Old MBR style partitions first and GPT last? There seem to be different ways to do the enumeration, and I am wondering what would be the "right" way to do it. To stay compatible with old DOS versions, GPT last would be the most obvious I think. But that may clash with the way Windows enumerated the drives.

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