DOS ain't dead - Detecting floppy disk drives

Berlin, Germany,
26.05.2009, 22:45

Detecting floppy disk drives (Developers)

What methods are available to detect if (or what type of) floppy disk drives are present on a DOS system?

I found the following:
MEM 0040h:0010h
INT 11h
CMOS 10h

There seem to be more, because all these functions already return "none", but MSD.EXE and file managers (tested VC and FAR) running on MS-DOS 6.22 in QEMU 0.10.5 still report a FDDs A: and B: (40 cylinders, 2 heads, 9 sectors in MSD), although no floppy images were mounted.

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Rugxulo Usono, 27.05.2009, 00:51 @ rr	Detecting floppy disk drives Post reply
	> What methods are available to detect if (or what type of) floppy disk > drives are present on a DOS system? I don't know, but I think I know where to find out: DJGPP's mntent.c

Rugxulo

Usono,
27.05.2009, 02:46

@ Rugxulo

Detecting floppy disk drives

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> > What methods are available to detect if (or what type of) floppy disk
> > drives are present on a DOS system?
>
> I don't know, but I think I know where to find out:
>
> DJGPP's
> mntent.c

gcc -DTEST mntent.c -o mntent.exe
mntent.exe

0: Drive A: fd rw,dev=00 a:/ 1: Drive C: hd rw,dev=02 c:/ 2: PRESARIO_RP hd rw,dev=03 d:/ 3: C:\Armslurp\utils\ subst rw,dev=02 u:/ 4: C:\Armslurp\zips\ subst rw,dev=02 z:/

Berlin, Germany,
28.05.2009, 22:00

@ Rugxulo

Detecting floppy disk drives

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> I don't know, but I think I know where to find out:
>
> DJGPP's
> mntent.c

mntent doesn't show my "phantom" drives, which is correct.

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nidud Norway, 07.06.2009, 20:57 @ rr	Detecting floppy disk drives Post reply
	> > I don't know, but I think I know where to find out: > > > > > DJGPP's > > mntent.c > > mntent doesn't show my "phantom" drives, which is correct. int 13h, ah=15h, dl=drive number (00h/01h) -- GET DISK TYPE normally this function returns CF set if no drive, but sometimes it actually works: CF clear, ah=00h (no such drive)

Japheth

Germany (South),
27.05.2009, 07:17

@ rr

Detecting floppy disk drives

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> I found the following:
> MEM 0040h:0010h
> INT 11h
> CMOS 10h

int 13h, ah=08, dl=00
on return, dl=number of FDs, bl=type of first floppy (1,2,3,4,...)

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MS-DOS forever!