[Coco] DECB FAT question

[Roger Taylor]

At 02:05 AM 1/16/2007, you wrote:

>So, one thing I've been wondering:  Are there any Disk BASIC programs
>that will ignore allocated granule chains in the FAT if they don't
>have a directory entry?
>
>For example, my evil hybrid CP/M - CoCo disk.  The first 32 granules
>are marked as a single file in the CoCo FAT, but I didn't create a
>directory entry for that chain.  Are there programs out there that
>would have a problem with this?


I think that Disk BASIC checks the FAT data alone, not the directory 
entries, to see which granules on the disk are free.

In fact, you can "fix" faulty disks by marking the bad sectors 
(actually, 9 at a time, a granule), as bad or unuseable.  The file 
storage routines will skip right over those granules when looking for 
free ones.