#348 Remote Drive Compatibility
I’ve noticed that a couple of my ancient programs (and some stuff by other developers) reject a couple drives as being “invalid” under FreeDOS when no problem occurs under other DOS platforms like MS & PC-DOS. Namely, a mounted share using EtherDFS and the CD-ROM drive. So, I started making a utility to assist in diagnosing the compatibility issue. I don’t know if I’ll put anymore effort into the Diagnostic tool. I’ve already spent far too much time on this issue.
As test platforms, I setup two VirtualBox machines. One with MS-DOS 6.22, UDVD2, MSCDEX, A PACKET DRIVER and ETHERDFS. The Network share as drive N: and CD as X:. Under FreeDOS, the same except for using SHSUCDX.
The Diagnostic tool doesn’t test a lot at present. But with what it already checks, I see two discrepancies.
First under MS-DOS, INT 21 Function 4408, reports “error 1, Invalid function number” for drive N & X. But for those drives, FreeDOS reports “error 15, Invalid drive” There is a big difference between those error codes. One means “I can’t answer that” and the other is “no such drive”
Anyhow, the less than complete Drive Diagnostic tool can be fetched from https://fd.lod.bz/repos/current/pkg-html/drvdiag.html
Eric provided additional information in the news group post on this subject
https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/message/37341862/
