A big disadvantage is that umsdos is supposedly very slow.
How about this as an alternative/replacement for umsdos:
1) Under dos, create a large contiguous file--obviously this is a dos file
in a dos partition.
2) Convince Linux to use this file as if it were a linux partition.
3) Do the normal linux things to it--specifically: mkfs & mkswap.
When I worked on vax/vms years ago, we had a similar thing, it was called a
"virtual disk"; the file in which it lived was called a "container file".
(It's very similar to the CVS of drvspace and stacker). You could mount the
virtual disk, format it, etc. just as if it was a real disk.
This would provide us with the 1st advantage of umsdos, but also the
performance, reliability, etc. of ext2 (or actually, any other linux
filesystem). The 2nd advantage of umsdos (and I'm not sure how important it
actually is) could be handled by the set of programs which access an ext2 fs
from dos (I forget it's name).
I think this would be fairly easy to do, and I'd be willing to work on it.
Please tell me what you think about this--and if you think it's worth doing,
any tips/tricks/shortcuts that might be valuable in making it work. BTW, I
am thinking that this would NOT sit on top of msdos, as umsdos does, but
rather would only access the msdos filesystem once, to find this container
file and gets it's size and physical location.
Regards,
Ray Van Tassle
rayvt@comm.mot.com