Subject: Fdpatches 3.0 uploaded: Put 1992k on a single floppy disk!
From: [email-masked] (Alain Knaff)
Date: 22 Jul 1994 22:04:37 +0300
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce

I have uploaded a new version of fdpatches to sunsite and tsx, called
fdpatches-3.0-for-1.1.31.src.tar.gz.
 At sunsite, it is now in Incoming, and will probably moved to
/pub/Linux/kernel/patches/diskdrives
 At tsx it is now in /incoming, and will probably be moved to
/pub/linux/patches
  After applying this patch you will be able to use formats with more
than the usual 18 (or 15, or 36) sectors per track and with more than
80 tracks. For instance you will be able to squeeze 1992 K on a HD
3''1/2 disk, and 3984 K on an ED disk. This patch to works with linux
1.1.31.

 This patch also contains:
	1) support for 2 controllers (not yet tested),
	2) support for logical blocksizes other than 1024 bytes 
	   (you can now use the floppy drive as a slow swap device)
	3) for sectors bigger than 512 bytes
	4) lots of configuration options, support for sending raw commands 
	   to the floppy disk controller, ...

 The package also contains a new mtools to format and to use the new
high capacity floppy disks. It has the following new features:

	1) Support for variable sector sizes.
	2) Support for Ciriaco Garcia's "2m" formats.
	3) Support for formatting 16-bit fat disks.
	4) Support for formatting ED disks (Their capacity is too big to
	   use a 12 bit FAT and 1 sector clusters. It either uses bigger
	   clusters or a 16 bit FAT)

 The mtools of the old fdpatches package added already the following
features to the stock 2.0.7 mtools:

	1) Mtools can now set the disk geometry on Linux. (Useful for
	reading 1.72 Mb disks. This was already possible on unixpc and
	SPARC )
	2) New mmount command. Reads the bootsector, sets the geometry
	and finally mounts the disk.
	3) Mwrite can now write stdout to a dos file: mwrite - a:test
	4) Mread now also acts as mtype: mread a:test -
        These two features are useful for piping and for scripts.
	5) Mtools now tries 3 sources to get its drive geometry.
	configuration: first ~/.mtoolsrc, then /etc/mtools, and finally 
	compiled-in. ( The two first are conditional on LOADDEVS being
	defined ). LOADDEVS is now compatibles with the various geometry
	setting routines (init_linux, init_sparc and init_unixpc).
	6) Bug fixes for -t mode of mwrite and mread. (For certain
	file sizes the trailing dos end-of-file character wasn't
	correctly written.)
	7) Bug fixes for "drive probing code" in init.c (Now failure to lock 
	onto a disk causes always trial of the next configuration. Before, 
	mtools used to abort on certain cases). Similar fixes in mformat.
	8) Optimization/bug fix of cluster/fat repartition in mformat.c
	9) Made fat checking code optional. (1.72mb disks mformatted with old 
        mtools were almost always rejected) To bypass fat-checking set the
	environment variable MTOOLS_FAT_COMPATIBILITY.
	10) Mtools now opens /dev/tty to ask for confirmation messages. This
        way, it doesn't interfere with mreading/mwriting from/to stdin/stdout.

See also the included README and mtools/Release.Notes files for details.
-- 
 Alain

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