🚀 go-pugleaf

Not to belabor the point over so many ng's:

The problem is not in the TOC itself but in the way information is
accessed. A CD-ROM is read through MS extensions as though it were a
650-MB HD in FAT16. I do not know whether the slack space is actually
recorded as zeroes - but I suspect that it is from some very rough tests
I ran.

Your assertions are logical, but I do not believe that MS employed such
logic in designing MSCDEX.

Mike

Mark Griffiths wrote:
> 
> Mike Richter (mrichter@mindspring.com) wrote:
> : Have you compared with the total number of bytes in files or with the
> : amount of space that would be needed on a 650-MB hard drive? Because the
> : data must be interpreted as though the TOC were a FAT, you lose space at
> : the end of sectors as though you had a FAT there. To get a factor of
> : two, you would have had to have had lots of small files and (probably)
> : lots of directories.
> 
> A 650MB hard disk formated with FAT32 will normally have 4096 byte
> clusters (yes you can change it).  Formatted with FAT16, the cluster size
> will be 16384 bytes.  Both of these are greater than the 2048 byte
> sectors used on CDs, meaning larger amounts of slack on the hard drive.
> Also, directories on hard disks (and floppies) are actually special types
> of files, hence the same problem of small directories wasting large
> amounts of space.  AFAIK, the TOC on a CD is simply a list of filenames
> with a starting sector number as well as a bit of other data, hence
> directories on CDs shouldn't waste space in the same way.
> 
> Although the original post mentioned something about only 1 track, it may
> be that he is actually looking at a multi-session CD - Multi-session CDs
> tend to waste a huge amount of space, especially if only a small amount
> of data is added with each session.
> 
> Regards,
> Mark Griffiths.

-- 
mrichter@mindspring.com
http://mrichter.simplenet.com
CD-R http://resource.simplenet.com