About This Guide

DR-DOS is a disk operating system designed to run on Intel* Pentium, i486, 386, 80286, 8088, 8086 and compatible microprocessors. This guide describes the internal structures of DR-DOS and the invariant programming interface.

This guide is primarily a reference tool intended for experienced programmers and for OEM’s or system builders. It assumes you are fully familiar with general aspects of assembly-language programming and in particular with the Intel microprocessor architecture. It also assumes you are familiar with the hardware components of your own system.

Structure of the Guide

This guide is divided into the following chapters:

• Chapter 1 introduces the DR-DOS operating system. It provides general information about the overall structure of DR-DOS.
• Chapter 2 describes the file management system and data structures used by DR-DOS.
• Chapter 3 describes DR-DOS support for interrupts.
• Chapter 4 describes the DR-DOS function calls, except for Device I/O Control, which is described in Appendix A.
• Chapter 5 describes the error handling facilities of DR-DOS.
• Chapter 6 provides information on how to write loadable device drivers for DR-DOS.
• Chapter 7 describes the structure of the DR-DOS BIOS and discusses how the sample BIOS may be modified to suit specific hardware.
• Appendix A describes the Device I/O Control (44H) function call.
• Appendix B details the Task Manager (TaskMGR) functions.

Related Manuals

The following manuals contain further information about DR-DOS:

• DR-DOS User Guide.
• This manual documents the DR-DOS user interface, and explains the various features used to execute application programs and utility programs.
• Embedding DR-DOS in ROM With a ROMDISK.
• This manual provides an overview of the procedure for generating a ROM-based DR-DOS system. It also describes an example procedure for building a DR-DOS system in ROM.
• Implementing Power Management (BatteryMAX) in DR-DOS
• This manual gives an overview of the way in which power saving features (BatteryMAX) is implemented in DR-DOS.
• Multitasking API Guide
• This manual describes the DR-DOS multitasking API.
• DPMS API 1.0 Guide
• This manual describes the DPMS specifications and issues raised by programming for DPMS using the DPMS SDK.

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