Hello Richard:
On Mon, 01 Jan 2001 14:00:36 +0100 (CET), [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Richard Menedetter)
wrote:
> Hi
> 23 Dec 2000, "Samuel W. Heywood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> SH> One of the major problems I have in trying to accomplish very
> SH> meaningful and important tasks with a machine running Windows 95 and
> SH> above is that the machine doesn't behave very well with the version of
> SH> DOS that is installed into Windows 95.
> ?? what does 'does not behave very well mean ??
Good question. The answer depends on the criteria under which a thing or
a person is being evaluated. Some would say that a soldier is
"well-behaved" if he conducts himself according to the way he has been
trained, but what if he were trained to do things that are wrong? Some
would say that a device or a machine or a software product is "well-behaved"
if it functions according to the way it is engineered and designed, but what
if it were designed in such a way that it would inevitably produce
undesireable results? You have to consider the criteria of the evaluator
who judges the behavior as being good or bad.
Here are just some of the things I don't like about WIN95 DOS:
It has too large a footprint and too great an appetite for memory. For
this reason there are many DOS apps that simply will not run under WIN95
DOS. Compare COMMAND.COM for WIN95 DOS: 93,812 bytes, as opposed to
COMMAND.COM for DR-DOS 7.02: 66,657 bytes.
The COPY command under WIN95 DOS will not overwrite by default. You have
to either respond to a prompt or use a parameter to suppress the prompt.
This is a hassle, IMNSHO.
WIN95 DOS lacks some necessary utilities, such as the UNDELETE command.
Upon booting, WIN95 DOS loads a GUI by default. You have to either respond
to some prompts or resort to a hassle and read some manuals in order to
figure out how to fix this behavior. This is a very poor design feature,
IMNSHO. Whether to automatically load a GUI upon booting is something that
ought to be called or commented out in AUTOEXEC.BAT, as it is in the normal
versions of Windows (3.x). I don't know why the developers of WIN95 wanted
to complicate the booting procedure.
> I'm using the DOSes from both versions, and have not noticed any bad
> behaviour in years.
Your criteria for evaluating behavior in this case is based upon whether
you think the DOSes are performing as engineered and designed.
> SH> Given a machine with Windows 95 installed on a hard drive having a
> SH> FAT 16 partition, and the partition's size not being too big to be
> SH> recognized by your favorite DOS version,
> if it is fat16, than the partition size can't be too big ...
> win95/98 IS dos, so there can't be a partition size which windows
> 'understands' and dos not.
If you have WIN95 installed on a 100 MB partition on your C: drive, and you
boot to a floppy being a DOS 3.30 system disk, then your DOS will not
recognize the C: drive because DOS 3.30 cannot recognize a partition greater
than 32 MB
> (it's the same with fat32, but you need a special DOS which understands it)
> SH> would it be OK to boot to a floppy being a DOS system disk, and then
> SH> fix the hard drive's operating system simply by doing "A>sys C:"
> SH> Theoretically, that should fix it.
> I don't understand the term 'to fix' here ...
In the context and colloquial sense I intended, "to fix" means simply
"to change". You might not yet have encountered until just now such a
usage of the term. The more common and frequent usage of "to fix" is in
the context of "to repair or adjust".
> This will boot the other version from dos the next time.
Yes, agreed. My questions mainly concerned whether I would later be able
to readily change it back to what I started with by using the same method.
I have since learned that it can be changed back again, but the procedure can
get somewhat complicated and I could easily screw up if I fail to observe
a lot of precautions.
> SH> would I not easily be able to restore my original Windows 95
> SH> installation simply by re-booting to a Windows 95 system disk floppy
> SH> and then using the SYS command again to transfer the operating system
> SH> files back to the hard drive?
> yes .... but this is the absolutely hardest way to achieve this.
> 1.) if you have a M$-DOS installed prior to installing windows 9x, than you
> can boot to this by the f8 startmenu
> 2.) drdos has a bootmanager (ie if you install drdos to a windows
> partition, you can choos which os to boot)
> [some drdos guru sure can tell you more about that)
I was thinking of installing DR-DOS on a WIN95 partition *after* WIN95
had already been installed. I have received some advice on this and I
think I will try it.
<snip>
All the best,
Sam Heywood
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