MSDOS server debugging problems

Hello everyone,

  I've been VSTa-less for FAR too long because of bugs in the DOS
server so I'm now taking some steps to do something about it.

The problems come from several places, first of which is the fact that
the DOS server dosn't like something that Win95 does to the disk
structures to achieve it's "totally backward compatible long filenames".

There is also trouble when I try and use the DOS server on a large
extended DOS partition I have. I'm not sure exactly what the root of that
problem is... but I'll find out.

Anyhow, since I never was able to get ahold of a bootable VSTa floppy, I
recently formatted my MSDOS "c:" partition so it would be nice and clean
and the VSTa DOS server would like it.

Fortunatly, it does like it. So, to begin the struggle here, I'm trying
to get the DOS server to startup for the extended partition which still
has some remnants of what Win95 did to it.

Ok, so I have a problem. When I start the DOS server with the line:

dos -p cam:sd1_dos0 fs/d

it immediately bombs. The syslog error says

dos (pid 3852) error: read (95744 bytes) of FAT failed

I changed the line in fat.c which does the "read()" so that it stores
the amount it actually DOES read and it only gets 4096 bytes.

According to the information in the Bios Parameter Block for that
partition, the FAT should be 187 sectors long, which checks out with the
95744 bytes that the DOS server thinks it should be reading. I did some
manual "dumpsect" reads around the 9th sector and none of them had any
problems reading the data.

So my question is: why would "read()" only read part of what it was asked to
read? the DOS server expects it to be read all in one call and it works
fine for my other FAT filesystem. Should the DOS server be able to handle
a partial read and just continue? Or is there some deeper problem which
is causing the partial read?
Received on Sat Jun 24 04:53:15 1995