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I was going to respond that DOS didn't have any such fanciness, but then I remembered SmartDrive. And indeed, it turns out it had a write-behind cache [1] that may well have ruined your day if abused in such fashion.

[1] https://www.computerhope.com/smartdrv.htm



I remember itade me learn how fat worked, then I would use debug to make recursive directory trees with large files in them so a dir /s would terminate at max depth with a huge aize reported. I used it to make people in my HS cs class think I had found really good floppy disks.


I lost tons of work when playing with toy assembly language programs in DOS, when I would save and compile and run it and it did something to crash necessitating a reboot, faster than SmartDrive would write the cache to disk. Particularly for anything crash-prone like messing with hooking interrupt vectors.




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