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From: "dom" <dcurran AT ti DOT com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Can't read HDD sectors, why?
Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 18:50:49 -0600
Organization: Texas Instruments
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To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com

Hi

I'm having all sorts of problems, and getting very confused.

I want to read sectors from my HDD.
I am using the following code (which is almost identical to the help code
for _bios_disk).

If I run this code from a Win98 dosbox then it returns a status of 0x50
(Data read error && Seek error).
If I run this code after booting to the dos prompt using a Win98 boot disk
it returns a status of 0x01 (Invalid request or a bad command).

Can anyone tell me why ?
And how I can solve this problem ?

#include <stdio.h>
#include <bios.h>
int main()
{
 char     record_buffer[512];
 struct diskinfo_t  di;
      unsigned    status;

 printf("Read sector\n");

 di.drive    = 0x80;
 di.head     = 0;
 di.track    = 0;
 di.sector   = 0;
 di.nsectors = 1;
 di.buffer   = &record_buffer;

      status = _bios_disk(_DISK_READ, &di);

 if ( status )
  printf("Disk error.(%i)\n", status);
 else
  printf("OK\n");

 return 0;
}

I have been banging my head on this problem every night this week.
I thought that when booting to the DOS prompt using a Win98 boot disk, I
would be in a 16-bit enviroment.  Is this true ?  Might this have something
to do with it ?

NOTE: A call to _dos_getdiskfree(..) seems to work OK.

Any help much appreciated.
Also I'm new to DJGPP, so please make help as verbose as possible.

Thanks
dom