When I first wrote Explore2fs it was for Windows NT. NT allows you to access and direct access storage device as a random access file. This meant that I could just open the appropriate disk and read the data off. There was however a cry for support from Windows 95 users who were suffering from an OS with no design at all. I did a lot of research on disk access and all I could work out was how to crash windows. Eventually I found a MS Knowledge base article which pointed me at a solution. The article can be found here http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q137/1/76.asp Armed with this information I set about writing a 16 bit DLL which would do the disk access for me. Using an old copy of Borland C++ 3.1 I was able to build a DLL which implemented the appropriate functions. Of course I could not have done that without the help of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List. The next task was to call the code from Win32. The Microsoft Thunk compiler was a load of crap which did not have any useful documentation or examples but I eventually found a solution, and just to make my life easy for a change the code was already written in Delphi. QT Thunk is a method of calling 16 bit library functions from Win32 without and crap in the middle. http://red.east.net.cn/~develop/Delphi/Document/thunk95.htm Once I had this working I could access disks using the original BIOS interrupts from Win32. The next problem was that the PC BIOS can not read disks larger that 8 Gig. Some further research turned up Extended Interrupt 0x13, a standard extension to Int 0x13 which allowed large disk access. Armed with Ralf Browns Interrupt List once again I updated the 16 bit DLL to support this new interface. On the other side of the problem, I had a disk IO method for Windows NT and a method for 95. I created a base class for disk access and an implementation for NT and 95, each using the appropriate method. The final result is a relatively clean cross MS OS disk access library. The complete delphi source can be obtained from the Explore2fs Package. The source to diskIO2.dll can be downloaded from here Win32 /\ / \ / \ / \ | | | | Win16 NT Win32 Subsystem | | DPMI | | BIOS Int 0x13 Last modified 26/02/01 |
