[Coco] OT: Upgrade to WIndows 10?

[Mark McDougall]

On 25/11/2015 1:02 PM, Salvador Garcia wrote:

> Anecdote: Everyone run to the hills. Back in the early 90s a client
> needed a complex data gathering app, complete with a backup to floppy
> option (yup,it was that long ago). And it had to be encrypted. After
> much work and debugging I came up with a process that wrote directly
> to the floppy's sectors. I came up with my own file system. I
> compressed the data and broke it down into sectors. The end result
> was a floppy that could not be read by anything except the restore
> process. Then Windows came along and I had to scrap everything
> because I could no longer write to the disk the way I wanted. We were
> hoping to use this process for all of our software, but it was the
> time when Windows became standard office equipment and my process now
> sits somewhere on some archived backup aging along with its creator.

I guess the "proper" way to do it these days is write some sort of 
storage / file system filter? driver and have it implement the custom 
format for you. But from what I understand of windows device drivers, 
they're on the trickier end of the scale. The up side is that your 
application only "sees" a standard file system. The down side is all the 
BSOD-riddled development and deployment and installation required.

Because we were fiddling MBR's and partition tables directly, we 
couldn't even do that. Basically we needed access to the raw block 
device; something Win7 took away apparently.

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall              | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug> |   with less resistance!"