Monthly Archives: July 2011

Detecting floppy drive presence and type

Detecting floppy drives is surprisingly tricky and poorly understood. The difficulty lies mainly in the interface between the floppy disk controller (FDC) and the actual drive(s). The interface isn’t particularly complex, but it isn’t straightforward, and it does not follow … Continue reading

Posted in BIOS, PC architecture | 1 Comment

DOS boot sector, BPB, and the media descriptor byte

All DOS programmers know that DOS storage media (floppies, fixed disks, even RAM drives) have a BPB (BIOS Parameter Block) which describes the basic layout of the storage medium. All DOS programmers also know that every DOS disk contains a … Continue reading

Posted in DOS | 1 Comment