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like the fact that windows doesn't recognize a fat partition if anything but MSWIN4.1 is in the FAT table (OEM Field)). I tried writing another string in there, and it just wouldn't recognize my drive, changed it to MSWIN4.1 like MS uses, and bam it worked.

since only 1 single version of 1 single edition of windows puts that string in the OEM field, there must be something else wrong...

under older computers, running DOS/win3 that field commonly contained the name of the company you purchased the computer from (for example, IBM systems contained some form of 'IBM' in that field) and default DOS installations put the DOS version number in that field

some (and only some) versions of windows '98 i believe used that (win '95 had a different string, and if you want, you can easily change the string win '9x uses in that field), windows XP (or at least OEM) used random letters and numbers as sort of a extended disk signature, and all of those disks are completely readable on all windows systems (unless you happen to have a rare copy with a unique bug in the FAT driver... highly unlikely -- and in that case, it wouldnt read any disk formatted by any computer other than your own... for the aforementioned reason)


btw: the term 'MSWIN4.1' refers to windows 'version' 4.1 -- which is windows '98 -- in other words, if you are correct, only disks formatted with unaltered copies of windows '98 (that is, if you got win'98 pre-installed on a DELL computer, it wouldnt work, since DELL changes that line to something else) would work

JAAman wrote:

like the fact that windows doesn't recognize a fat partition if anything but MSWIN4.1 is in the FAT table (OEM Field)). I tried writing another string in there, and it just wouldn't recognize my drive, changed it to MSWIN4.1 like MS uses, and bam it worked.

since only 1 single version of 1 single edition of windows puts that string in the OEM field, there must be something else wrong...

under older computers, running DOS/win3 that field commonly contained the name of the company you purchased the computer from (for example, IBM systems contained some form of 'IBM' in that field) and default DOS installations put the DOS version number in that field

some (and only some) versions of windows '98 i believe used that (win '95 had a different string, and if you want, you can easily change the string win '9x uses in that field), windows XP (or at least OEM) used random letters and numbers as sort of a extended disk signature, and all of those disks are completely readable on all windows systems (unless you happen to have a rare copy with a unique bug in the FAT driver... highly unlikely -- and in that case, it wouldnt read any disk formatted by any computer other than your own... for the aforementioned reason)


btw: the term 'MSWIN4.1' refers to windows 'version' 4.1 -- which is windows '98 -- in other words, if you are correct, only disks formatted with unaltered copies of windows '98 (that is, if you got win'98 pre-installed on a DELL computer, it wouldnt work, since DELL changes that line to something else) would work

I don't know, I definetly had that issue, I tried using the name of my OS (using the same # of characters) and it wouldn't work, changed it back to MSWIN4.1 and it reads perfect (no other changes to any code, just changed the string value with a string of the same length, and my function only copies 8 bytes anyways, so no chance of over-running it). I don't know why, but that's what happened... which is odd, since now that I think of it, I was running chkdsk under '98 command prompt boot (boot to dos from 98), so possibly that was the issue. I can't remember exactly what it was doing (it was over a year back now), maybe it was just throwing a warning in chkdsk, but i am pretty sure it was having issues reading it properly. I can't even remember if it was a floppy or my hard disk partition, i was working on a lot of disk utilities and such at the time, once I figured it out, i didn't mess with it to much more.