DOS ain't dead

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

posted by bretjohn  , Rio Rancho, NM, 26.09.2025, 23:48

> 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...

It depends on whether you're talking about DOS in general or FreeDOS specifically. The MS-DOS kernel can handle sector sizes other than 512 bytes, and I think some others can also (like PC-DOS). I'm also not sure about any of the DOS disk utility programs (FDISK, FORMAT, CHKDSK, etc.).

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