[ros-kernel] floppy driver update

Vizzini vizzini at reactos.com
Sat Mar 13 01:44:37 CET 2004


Not that it's been terribly exciting, but I think I have the new floppy
driver up to the spot that the old one was, plus lots of fixed bugs and
probably a couple of new ones.  There are still tons of improvements to
be made before this could be considered a real floppy driver, but it
should be enough to handle 1.44MB floppies and not exhibit the explorer
freeze bug that we all know and love.

I've been developing under windows 2000 and XP so far, so now I'm
starting the process of getting it working in ReactOS.  Meanwhile, it'll
need testing on other boxes with other controllers.  If you have some
time to kill, grab http://plasmic.com/~vizzini/floppy.sys and see if it
works with your windows box.  The basic idea for testing:

 - put the new driver in %systemroot%\system32\drivers (back up the old
one if you're on nt4)
 - create an SCM entry (see hivesys.inf for samples)
 - disable the old driver (if in win2k+, disable the floppy disk
*controller* in device manager; that'll disable fdc.sys and
flpydisk.sys)
 - start the new one (e.g. net start floppy)
 - copy c:\boot.ini a: (or whatever else you want to test)

Couple of notes:
 - I tried to duplicate the way things worked in the old reactos driver,
unless I knew for sure that they were wrong.  When in doubt, I looked at
the 82077 datasheet, linux, freebsd, and the sample floppy driver from
the nt3.5 ddk.  If I have created a bug that doesn't exist in the
existing reactos driver, do let me know.

 - Performance is terrible at the moment due to heavy debug prints and
stupid speed/specify parameters.  

I want to get this in before the feature freeze for 0.2.2.

 -Vizzini




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