INT 25 - DOS 1+ - ABSOLUTE DISK READ (except partitions > 32M) AL = drive number (00h = A:, 01h = B:, etc) CX = number of sectors to read (not FFFFh) DX = starting logical sector number (0000h - highest sector on drive) DS:BX -> buffer for data Return: CF clear if successful CF set on error AH = status (see #02547) AL = error code (same as passed to INT 24 in DI) AX = 0207h if more than 64K sectors on drive -- use new-style call may destroy all other registers except segment registers Notes: original flags are left on stack, and must be popped by caller this call bypasses the DOS filesystem examination of CPWIN386.CPL indicates that if this call fails with error 0408h on an old-style (<32M) call, one should retry the call with the high bit of the drive number in AL set Novell DOS 7 decides whether the old-style or new-style (>32M) version of INT 25 must be used solely on the basis of the partition's size, thus forcing use of the new-style call even for data in the first 32M of the partition PCIBM PC Tools MIRROR as shipped with MS-DOS 5.0+ checks several signatures at the beginning of INT 25h and INT 26h before it starts to patch these vectors. The signatures it looks for are 83h, F9h, FFh, 74h (CMP CX,-01; JZ ????) at offset +1 from the INT 25h/26h entry points and 2Eh, FFh, 2Eh (JMP DWORDDoubleword; four bytes. Commonly used to hold a 32-bit segment:offset or selector:offset address. PTR CS:[????]) at the location pointed to by the JZ ????. If it finds these signatures it will use the target address of the far jump for its sub-sequent checks, otherwise it will just take the previous interrupt entry points when scanning for FAh, 2Eh, 8Ch, 16h (CLI; MOV CS:????,SS) or FAh, 2Eh, 89h, 26h (CLI; MOV CS:????,SP) right at the beginning. Hence, it seems the first two checks are to trace through a specific INT 25h/26h filter. However, the purpose of the whole patch is unknown. A method to detect the actual assignments of logical drive numbers to physical BIOS(Basic Input/Output System) A set of standardized calls giving low-level access to the hardware. The BIOS is the lowest software layer above the actual hardware and serves to insulate programs (and operating systems) which use it from the details of accessing the hardware directly. drive units (for example to detect the boot drive), is to temporarily mount an INT 13h handler recording the used DL drive unit for any INT 13/AH=02h read operations and discarding any attempts to access actual floppy drives. Then call INT 25h for all the appropriate DOS drives and watch the results recorded by the INT 13h interceptor. Although all registers except segment registers may be destroyed some software depends on some of the registers being preserved. For example some Flash disk drivers requires that DX is not trashed. DR-DOS 7.03 takes care of this. BUGS: DOS 3.1 through 3.3 set the word at ES:[BP+1Eh] to FFFFh if AL is an invalid drive number DR DOS 3.41 will return with a jump instead of RETF, leaving the wrong number of bytes on the stack; use the huge-partition version (INT 25/CX=FFFFh) for all partition sizes under DR DOS 3.41 DR DOS 6.0 original issues 05/1991 & 08/1991 reported wrong error codes for "drive not ready" and "write protect". This was fixed with the DR DOS BDOS patch "PAT321" (1992/02/19, XDIR /C: 947Bh), and later "full" rebuilds (see INT 21/AX=4452h for details). SeeAlso: INT 13/AH=02h,INT 25/CX=FFFFh,INT 26,INT 21/AX=7305h,INT 21/AH=90h"PTS" (Table 02547) Values for disk I/O status: 80h device failed to respond (timeout) 40h seek operation failed 20h controller failed 10h data error (bad CRC) 08h DMAsee Direct Memory Access failure 04h requested sector not found 03h write-protected disk (INT 26 only) 02h bad address mark 01h bad command