🚀 go-pugleaf

Don Locke wrote:

> But how does CHKDSK A: work?

As Bob has said ChkDsk doesn't check every sector. It just checks what
is called the "metadata" of the file system. Assuming that the floppy
has no subdirectories ChkDsk will not wander beyond the first couple of
tracks of a disk.

As regards speed, how fast is the clunk-clunk-clunk? It should three or
four clunks a second resulting in the whole process being complete in
around half a minute. If there are only one or two clunks a second it
implies that your floppy drive is not using read-ahead and is reading
one sector at a time.

You can test/fix this by changing my function so that it reads a
track's worth of data each time instead of 512 bytes. For a 1.4MB
floppy that means reading 18 blocks at a time. Most floppy drivers do
this behind the scenes anyway but we have found some that don't.

The only quick way to check for bad sectors as I wrote in a prior reply
is to check the FAT but aside from not always being accurate the truth
is that if you are writing files using the OS those bad markers in the
FAT will direct the data elsewhere anyway.

You need to check for bad sectors that aren't already flagged as bad
and unfortunately that means reading every sector on the disk. That
will take time - about as long as it takes to fill a floppy disk with
data.

-- 
Andrue Cope [TeamB]
[Bicester, Uk]
http://info.borland.com/newsgroups/guide.html