DOS Wrapper

Bob,

Man I hate this. I entered my password wrong and lost all the
stuff I originally wrote to you.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I am converting all of
my current source code from Borland C version 3.1 to something
else. That something else is currently PowerBasic 3.5.

I am working on reading/writing from DOS of an NTFS partition. I
have numerous tools that interrogate the hard disk under DOS using
C but wanted to move to a new/supported compiler environment and
I am sick of C.

I have reviewed a lot of code on the web for NTFS access. The
problem is that it is all currently read only and some of it won't
even read version 5.1 (XP release).

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I also am in the process
of converting my code to read himem.sys in banks of 64Meg. In my C
code it allows you to access memory up to 8GB within your application.
I use the memory as large caches for read/writes coupled with DMA
access to give it screaming performance.

all the best...
Mark Collins

[This message has been edited by Mark Collins (edited May 09, 2002).]

Mark,

Are you talking about booting an NT machine to DOS and then
being able about to manipulate the file system on an NTFS
partition?

I'm not clear on that from what you have written, but if that is
what you want to do, you are going to have to do some reverse-
engineering of NTFS internals and write your own API to the file
system in DOS. If you just want to read from a damaged partition
for data recovery, etc, it is not that hard to do, and it can
done in PB3.5. If you want to write to an NTFS partition from
DOS, well...good luck!

Thorough and accurate documentation on NTFS is available at
several places on the 'net. http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net
is a good place to start.

Bob Green

[Jerry Fielden]

Mark, while you are waiting for your suggestion to come true,
check out DOSBOX at perfectsync.com, maybe some of them might be
covered already. It did windows type things using keywords placed
in your source.

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Yeah, I've used it before. However, it would also mean having to
pay royalty fees. It would also mean getting source code from them
which we attempted to do a couple of years ago without success.

I was hoping that PowerBASIC could handle it. I also am hoping to
find out more about the upcoming version of PB for DOS as to what
may be possible. Or maybe get in a suggestion or two??



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[Lance Edmonds]

In that case, check out www.sysinternals.com where they have various NTFS code for DOS... go to the site map, then scroll down to "System Utilities".


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Lance
PowerBASIC Support
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

I am trying to build the ability to read/write NTFS file
structures from within DOS. I also want to be able to access
several other Windows APIs from within DOS. There is still a
real need from within DOS to handle support issues for when
it is not possible to boot the system to the host OS. There are
several other things that we would like to be able to do from
within DOS but we would need to discuss these off-line.

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[Lance Edmonds]

Mark, can you be more specific aboout what you want to achieve, please?

Maybe it would be easier to write a Windows (Protected Mode) app that does what you want, rather than trying to do it from DOS (real mode).

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Lance
PowerBASIC Support
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[Mel Bishop]

I seriously doubt this can be done under any circumstances. You
may try converting the driver to INLINE statements and trying it
from there, but again.....


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Has anyone attempted to take a Windows driver file and place a
wrapper around it so that it can be called from inside DOS?

For example, let's say that I want to call a Windows disk driver
from inside of DOS. I would place a call to it from within PB for
DOS and then execute the Windows driver to accomplish it.

I know it sounds strange but I do have my reasons. Any help would
be greatly appreciated!

all the best...
Mark

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