ELPDS: Inspecting FAT Partitions in 1995

I recovered another program I wrote in 1995: ELPDS, or Enhanced Logical & Physical Drive Status. Run ELPDS C: and it reports physical disk geometry, partition entries, FAT boot-sector details, and free space. It doesn’t change anything on the disk. My help says it was for checking whether a partition existed and was formatted. I think I was just trying to learn about the underlying partition mechanics. I didn’t write all of it. The help credits “Mr. Schaeffer” for a “huge part of FIPS code.” That was Arno Schaefer, whose name I misspelled. FIPS could split a FAT partition without deleting its files, often to make room for Linux. Comparing my code with the archived FIPS source found nearly identical boot-sector parsing, disk geometry routines, and even comments. I had turned its disk-reading machinery into a standalone status tool. GitHub Copilot CLI and I made a separate DOS port using Open Watcom, leaving the original source and executable unchanged. It runs in DOSBox-X against a…