starting off.

Ninjarider · Post by **Ninjarider** » Fri Jun 29, 2007 9:25 pm

Im tring to write an os completely in masm for the first part. I already have a boot disk setup for it. right now it has less intelegence than dos. it will repeat keystrokes on the screen. understands backspace, leftarrow and right arrow. when pressing enter will display entered text with any corrected errors. just did get a checkstring function running so that i can run commands. curently working on a fat12 file system so that i can have my os reside on a floppy for right now. I would like to have my own implementation of ntfs soon after.

my main question is should i have the user mount each drive before allowing them access to it, to and include floppies? should i have them mount drives at all?

Kevin McGuire · Post by **Kevin McGuire** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 5:19 am

Do it with mounting, and continue onward.

mathematician · Post by **mathematician** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 7:09 am

Keep things as simple for the user as you can. If there is a reason why you need to have them mount drives do it, otherwise don't.

Ninjarider · Post by **Ninjarider** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 2:24 pm

should i have it were the os will scan each drive to see if it can read the file system and if the computer cannot then allow the user to supply settings for it.

also have a filesystem question.
have different sections of the hard drive with different sector per clusters values, would it be a good idea to allow the user to change those values.

i was thinking for default setting for a modern hd to have the drive in 3 segments. 1 - being cylinder 0 to a cylinder thats just shy of halp, 2 - leaving off from 1 and going to about 3/4 of the way, 3 - being the last 1/4 of the drive.

mathematician · Post by **mathematician** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 2:51 pm

In order to access a file system you need a file system driver. Some such drivers, such as FAT12 for the floppy, or the default file system for the hard disk, will probably be built into the kernel itself. Others could be loaded from seperate files. But, if you do not have a driver for a particular file system, it would require the user to do more than just supply a few settings; he would need to install a driver for that file system.

The best way of subdividing a hard disk into sections would be to use the standard partitioning scheme, introduced with MS-DOS and still in use today. You could have the user specify the cluster size he wanted, whilst probably offering a default size, when a section/partition was initialised or formatted.

JJeronimo · Post by **JJeronimo** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 2:52 pm

mathematician wrote:Keep things as simple for the user as you can. If there is a reason why you need to have them mount drives do it, otherwise don't.

There is always a reason to require mounts...
Block Caches, and deciding when to flush them...

Linux caches floppies when they are mounted, unless you configure otherwise (btw, I don't know how)...

JJ