Hi all,
Does anyone know if it is possible to access a floppy disk in Windows (XP) directly via BIOS-calls ?
I want to read 800 Kb DSDD floppies, i.e. 80 tracks, 10 sectors, 2 sides. The default MSDOS diskformat for DSDD floppies however is 720 Kb (9 sectors).
By using _bios_disk (e.g. GNU C, Borland C), it is possible to access floppies of 800Kb. My program works fine but only in (native) MSDOS, not in Windows. When I access the 10th sector in Windows, I get an error or I get the 1st sector of the next track :-). In MSDOS everything works fine, so it's clearly not a problem of the BIOS or the hardware.
I guess Windows is blocking this kind of direct access.
What do I have to do ? I don't want to keep rebooting my PC with an MSDOS startdisk anymore... I want to process these disks directly from Windows ! Do I have to write a Windows driver - is a driver allowed to do this kind of access ? Or can it still be done by writing a "normal" program ?
Thanks in advance !
