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Xref: sserve comp.os.linux:55143 comp.os.linux.misc:1815 comp.os.386bsd.misc:1080 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!xlink.net!math.fu-berlin.de!unidui!du9ds4!prang From: prang@du9ds4.fb9dv.uni-duisburg.de (Juergen Prang) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.misc Subject: [A]RAWDISK.SYS: QIC-80 Backup of non-DOS disks Date: 22 Sep 93 11:41:12 GMT Organization: Universitaet Duisburg GH Lines: 40 Message-ID: <prang.748698072@du9ds4> NNTP-Posting-Host: du9ds4.fb9dv.uni-duisburg.de Summary: Announcement of RAWDISK.SYS 1.0 Keywords: QIC80,streamer,backup,non-DOS disk access Currently a lot of work is done, to implement a driver for QIC-80 (Floppycontroller-) Streamertapes. In the meantime I decided to write a DOS device driver, that enables logical access to non-DOS disks/partitions under DOS. RAWDISK.SYS is a DOS device driver, that maps an arbitrary portion of a harddisk (given by a start- and endcylinder) onto a logical DOS drive. The HD area is accessed (read or written) through a regular DOS file. Logical drive administration areas (bootsector, FAT and rootdirectory) are totally virtual, hence no additional HD space is required. The primary intention for this device driver is to get logical access to harddisks and partitions foreign to DOS, to enable the usage of any QIC-80 streamer and its DOS based backup software for making image backups of this HD area. The general approach of this driver, however, makes it possible to use almost any useful DOS utilities to manipulate the HD area. I recommend reading the documentation carefully. This is especially true, if you use this driver with a DOS version other than MS-DOS 5.0 or with a partitioned disk or with a disk that has more than 1024 cylinders or 63 sectors or 16 heads, because some features/limitations should be taken notice of. It is easy to destroy the contents of the whole disk misusing this driver. The driver requires partitions laying on cylinder boundaries, as long as you want to access a single partition only. The driver is available from: ftp.uni-duisburg.de: /pub/pc/misc/rawdsk10.zip login: anonymous, password: e-mail address Juergen -- Juergen Prang | prang@du9ds4.fb9dv.uni-duisburg.de University of Duisburg |******************************************** Electrical Engineering | Logic is a systematic method of coming Dept. of Dataprocessing | to the wrong conclusion with confidence