Re: SEUL: hardware detection

[Rick Jones <rickya@siservices.net>]

William T Wilson wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 17 Jan 1998, Mike Scott wrote:
> 
> > It should not be necessary to directly read the proprietary database format
> > of the W95 registry because (1) it also maintains the system.ini text file
> > for backward compatibility, just look at the section
> 
> I'll be a dirty bird!  How do you like that.  I like it very well, thank
> you. :)
> 
> Does it also maintain information on ALL other devices, such as network
> cards, mice, and so on?  If so, is that information specific enough for us
> to use?

The only info put in the ini files for compatability is info that
Windoze 3.x was aware of.  Anything beyond that will only be in the
registry.  Don't ask what the bounderies are, I don't know.  I fairly
positive that monitors aren't covered in the ini files, since win
previous to 95 didn't give a rat's ass what monitor you used.  So it's
along those lines.

> > (2) use regedit, and its "File/Export Registry" command to write the
> > registry to a text file for examination; search for the name of your card.
> 
> That's good, technically, but it requires the user to fire up regedit and
> fool with it.  That defeats the whole point - making this hardware
> detection business transparent and easy.
> 
> > Note that method (1) might be better because I noticed that the registry
> > not only had an entry for the name of my current video card, but also the
> > previous one that I replaced.  It might be easy to mistakenly pick the
> > wrong one.

The register has a bad habit of doing that with all entries.  I changed
ISP's, then my new ISP upgraded to 56k when they changed location so
changed numbers.  Looking in the registry, I found 5 dial-up entries. 
The deleted entries were still in there.  That goes for upgrading
modems...hell, everything.  But the entries are numerical.  So the
highest number should be the installed hardware *unless* there was a
downgrade done to the previous hardware since windows will just use the
previous values instead of adding a new entry.

> We'd need someone familiar with the format of the registry to poke around
> with this.

I've had some experiences with the registry.  If there aren't any
registry guru's out there, let me know what you need and I can get it in
fairly short order.

> Of course, PCI cards are *always* identified properly.  This is a function
> of PCI that we and MS both can count on.  A user with an ISA-based system,
> no OS installed, and who has no clue what his computer is made of, AND he
> has one of those finicky cards that doesn't like to be probed.  Let's call
> it a "special case" and save it for version 2.  :)

PCI is not always identified.  At least not by Windoze.  I had to
install a new inf file for it to call my card anything but a generic
Trident or TVGA (ISA cards).  With the inf file even ISA cards are read
properly since they store their ROM at memorey address C000 which has
the make/model in plain text.  Don't quote me on that memory location,
I'm too lazy to check it at the moment.

> > Concerning the use of a DOS boot floppy to defrag and resize a W95
> > partition; it would not work under FAT32 file system.  I believe the
> 
> No, but it's worth a shot.  There are in the grand scheme of things very
> few systems using FAT32, because OEM's realized that FAT32 was breaking
> all manner of applications and getting them irate customers on the tech
> support line.  FIPS and DOS-defrag will error gracefully when confronted
> with FAT32.  Actually, does anyone know whether DOS-defrag likes to mangle
> VFAT filenames?  Can we even distribute it?  If our installer detects
> FAT32, it will have to tell the user either to destroy his data or get
> partition magic.  Better than nothing.


There is a new version of FIPS that handles FAT32.  I think it's FIPS2
or something like that.  Shouldn't be hard to find.  As far as defrag. 
Just run the version sitting on the windoze partition.  If needed copy
it to the floppy.  It will have to be a windows (DOS 7.0) disk to work
though.