Command: drives

  USBDOS is a collection of different USB drivers and tools:
  DRIVES shows details about all available disk drives in DOS.

Syntax:

  DRIVES

Options:

  This program displays the information about all of the disk drives it
  can find and lets you know some technical information about them.
  The information includes things like important memory addresses related
  to the disk drivers, whether or not the drive has been accessed yet,
  and the capacity of the drive.

Comments:

  DRIVES is a program designed to let you view details about your disk
  drives (drive letters) in the same way that DOS looks at them. There is
  a table that DOS uses to manage disks, called the Current Directory
  Structure Table or CDS Table. Each entry in the CDS Table is a single
  CDS, and corresponds to a single drive letter (starting at A:). As the
  name implies, the CDS table keeps track of the current directory for
  each drive, as well as a small amount of other information (such as
  whether it is a physical drive or a network drive). Other than the
  current directory information, the most important thing stored in the
  CDS is a pointer to another structure called the Drive Parameter Block
  or DPB, which is where most of the critical information about the drive
  is actually stored. The DPB is discussed in the next paragraph. The
  total number of entries in the CDS Table (the total number of drive
  letters available) is determined by the LASTDRIVE setting in your
  CONFIG.SYS / FDCONFIG.SYS file, and cannot be changed after DOS
  has booted.
  For each valid CDS, there is a corresponding Drive Parameter Block or
  DPB. The DPB contains most of the critical details about the drive,
  including the FAT type, capacity, physical disk and partition
  information, etc. The DPB also contains a pointer to the device driver
  for the drive, usually installed by the DOS kernel or by a special
  driver in the CONFIG.SYS / FDCONFIG.SYS file. DOS never accesses
  the drive directly -- it always does it through the device driver.
  The Drive Parameter Block also contains a flag which becomes set when
  the drive has been Accessed in some fashion by DOS (when DOS has read
  some data from the drive). This flag is very critical, because until a
  drive (at least a removable drive, such as a floppy or USB disk) has
  been accessed, none of the other details in the DPB can be trusted. For
  example, the default DPB entry for a 3-1/2 inch floppy drive usually is
  set up to look like a low-capacity (720 kB) disk, but the Accessed flag
  is cleared. This tells DOS that there is a slot to plug in a disk, but
  because it hasn't been Accessed, we don't know how big the drive
  actually is. If you insert a 1.44 MB floppy, but don't read any data
  from it, the contents of the DPB won't change (it will still show an
  unaccessed 720 kB floppy). When you actually read some data from the
  drive, DOS will change the DPB entry to correspond to an accessed 1.44
  MB drive. However, with floppy drives, DOS will regularly unset (clear)
  the Accessed flag, since DOS can't actually tell if you've changed disks
  (media) or not. If the media has changed but the Accessed flag is not
  cleared, DOS will probably corrupt the new disk (because it thinks it is
  still the old disk).

  DRIVES simply shows you some of the details that are in the DOS Current
  Directory Structure (CDS) Table, and the corresponding Drive Parameter
  Block (DPB) entries. This is a "snapshot" view of all the disks you
  have, as viewed from the perspective of DOS. It is critical to keep in
  mind that if the drive has not been accessed yet (if the "ACCESd" column
  is not "Y" for a particular drive letter), none of the other details in
  the output may be accurate. That is simply how DOS handles removable
  disks which can be of different formats and capacities.

  For more information see:
    https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/drivers/usbdos/-/tree/master/DOC/DOSUSB
  OR:
    C:\FREEDOS\DOC\usbintro.doc (too big for edit, please use
    another edito, e.g. Blocek!)
  OR:
    https://bretjohnson.us/

Examples:

  drives

Command: drives

Syntax:

Options:

Comments:

Examples:

See also: