DOS ain't dead

YSDDT 0.1.2 (DOS Toolkit for Working with Disks & Partitions) (Announce)

posted by boeckmann, Aachen, Germany, 26.09.2025, 10:53

> 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...

Complete thread:

• YSDDT 0.1.2 (DOS Toolkit for Working with Disks & Partitions) - RayeR, 25.09.2025, 16:25 (Announce)
  • YSDDT 0.1.2 (DOS Toolkit for Working with Disks & Partitions) - Laaca, 25.09.2025, 21:23
    • YSDDT 0.1.2 (DOS Toolkit for Working with Disks & Partitions) - mceric, 25.09.2025, 22:27
      • YSDDT 0.1.2 (DOS Toolkit for Working with Disks & Partitions) - Rugxulo, 26.09.2025, 04:57
        • YSDDT 0.1.2 (DOS Toolkit for Working with Disks & Partitions) - mceric, 26.09.2025, 10:05
        • YSDDT 0.1.2 (DOS Toolkit for Working with Disks & Partitions) - RayeR, 26.09.2025, 15:51
  • YSDDT 0.1.2 (DOS Toolkit for Working with Disks & Partitions) - boeckmann, 26.09.2025, 10:53
    • YSDDT 0.1.2 (DOS Toolkit for Working with Disks & Partitions) - ecm, 26.09.2025, 15:23
    • YSDDT 0.1.2 (DOS Toolkit for Working with Disks & Partitions) - bretjohn, 26.09.2025, 23:48
      • YSDDT 0.1.2 (DOS Toolkit for Working with Disks & Partitions) - boeckmann, 27.09.2025, 13:12
  • YSDDT 0.1.2 (DOS Toolkit for Working with Disks & Partitions) - RayeR, 26.09.2025, 15:55