Atari MEGA STe Technical Information download pdf (Page 23)

4.5.2 Installing the Auto boot Driver

To install the auto boot driver you need to execute the USAB10.TOS program.

The driver installer will show all attached ACSI devices with target # and capacity detected. You first

have to select the device you want by typing the target value and press I key to confirm installation

(any other key will result in exit without install).

The program will install the driver in few seconds and will confirmed the installation. The drive is now

ready. You can restart computer, and it will auto boot, and mount the partitions defined.

Note that contrary to other HD drivers, PPDRIVER does not install the boot code in a specific partition

but in the free space (30KB) just after the MBR. This allow to select the C partition you want to use

from the list of all the available partitions on the media at boot time.

Option for uninstalling driver does not exist, because it makes no sense. Driver will be simply

deactivated if you install another driver on the media.

PPDRIVER supports TOS/DOS partitions created with the PP12U.PRG utility. It should also work with

TOS&DOS partitions created with HDDRIVER.

Note that PPDRIVER does not have any configurable option. It does not support XHDI and does not

include FOLDER100. This was done on purpose not to waste any space for gamers.

4.5.3 Removable Medium Drive Support

The PPDRIVER driver provides support for removable medium drives. The driver detects media

change and reinstalls all partitions at the next disk access after the media has changed.

The user needs to refresh the Desktop with Escape key. If you close a window, and reopen it, the

window will still show the old content until you press Escape key. This is strange, and indicates that

obviously TOS do not use media change detection for hard disks in the Desktop.

4.5.4 Accessing DOS Partitions

PPDRIVER can directly access FAT16A partitions of less than 32 Mbytes.

PPDRIVER driver is not designed to work with BigDOS as it does not provide XHDI support. If want to

use partitions over 512MB with BigDOS, you can download an older (and free) driver from P.Putnik

site.

4.5.5 Accessing TOS&DOS Partitions

Note that latest version of PPDRIVER allow access to TOS&DOS (TOS & Windows) partitions created

by PPDRIVER and by HDDRIVER.

Remember that with plain TOS the size of the partitions is limited to 512MB. Although it is possible to

create several TOS & Windows partitions on a SD card with PPDRIVER, Windows normally only

access one partition on a removable media. However by using the procedure describe in Accessing

Multiple Partitions from SD Cards it is possible to access all the partitions created by PPDRIVER

directly in Windows.

For example I have created 4 partitions using a 2GB SD card plugged on a CosmosEx device. As all

the resulting partitions are below 512MB they can be read correctly directly from ST. Using the Hitachi

Microfilter driver it is also possible to directly access these 4 partitions directly on Windows.

4.5.6 Driver usage

Most interesting feature is selecting active C partition during boot - just follow messages on screen.

Although driver auto boots only from DOS/TOS compatible partitions it handles AHDI (TOS) type

partitioned disks/medias too. Therefore if drive with TOS partitions is attached (can’t be a boot device),

the partitions will be mounted.

Of course, you need to take care about the TOS partitions limit with a maximum of 14 (C-P).

There is another limit in this driver: a maximum of 3 ACSI targets is supported.

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Atari MEGA STe Technical Information Page 23

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