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From: john@moncol.UUCP (John Ruschmeyer)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Re: How does a program detect disks on
Message-ID: <515@moncol.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 3-Oct-85 00:22:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: moncol.515
Posted: Thu Oct  3 00:22:28 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 4-Oct-85 03:42:11 EDT
References: <1053@phs.UUCP> <21900085@uiucuxc>
Organization: Monmouth College, West Long Branch, NJ 07764
Lines: 35

>From: hamilton@uiucuxc.CSO.UIUC.EDU
>Message-ID: <21900085@uiucuxc>
>
>hmm this al==5 biz is interesting... i've spent some time looking
>at disassemblies of ibmbio.com and ibmdos.com (V3.0), and i've
>noticed several 6-element arrays indexed by drive#.  i always
>thought it was possible to have as many as 26 drives, so this was
>puzzling.  if i get real ambitious, i'll split up my ram disk and
>see what happens after i create a 6th drive.

I don't know the whole story, but as I understand it a new config.sys
option was added with Dos 3.x. It is called, I think, LASTDRIVE and is of
the form

	LASTDRIVE=letter

where 'letter' is the last drive letter to search. The default is 'E' which
is why al==5.

By the way, it is possible to have more than 26 drives. After Z:, however,
the names become too bizarre to use easily. You get stuff like ]: as a drive
name. (I once did this on a 384k machine , setting up ~30 5k ramdisks.)


-- 
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