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Are there any DOS applications and games that cause problems with IDE or SCSI hard drives?

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First post, by Exploit

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My question here is specifically aimed at programs that did not use the BIOS function 13h or DOS interrupt routine INT 21h for hard disk access and were specifically written for direct access to MFM or RLL hard disks?
I could also imagine that PC booters that have been ported to DOS could also be considered.

Are there any "normal" applications other than hard drive diagnostic tools, disk managers, partition managers, copy tools, low-level formatting tools, etc. that actually do such things?

Reply 1 of 1, by Jo22

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Hi, I'm not entirely sure.

- WfW 3.11 has FastDisk driver and HDD Cache and can access FAT16 filesystem/IDE HDD directly.
It also uses a fixed swap file that's one contiguous block of sectors.

All optionally, of course.
It can also use BIOS/DOS for HDD access and use temporary swap file (just a regular file). Or no swap file.

- DOS Plus 1.2 was made with XT Fixed-Disk Controller in mind and doesn't always work with normal IDE (to me, it once worked on a real PC years ago.)
Re: How to install DOS Plus (PC1512 version) ?

- Some database programs may access filesystem directly, without using DOS.
- Novell Netware uses DOS merely as a boot loader, then accesses HDD on its own.

- SmartDrive seems to be able to do the work of DOS when it comes accessing files and/or FAT filesystem.
Given it's a cache program, that makes sense.

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