On Sat, 29 Sep 2001 11:51:50 +0200 (CEST), [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Richard Menedetter) wrote:
> Hi
> 29 Sep 2001, "Samuel W. Heywood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> SH> could easily be solved by "DELTREE WINDOWS", but then I would still
> SH> have two problems in that they would both be running MS-DOS 7.00
> SH> instead of a good version of DOS.
> Why is DOS 7 not a good version ??
> I have never seen/heared of any problems with it.
> Have you experienced any ?
DR-DOS comes provided with much better utilities than WIN95 DOS 7.0.
Also I can always preserve a little more conventional memory with
DR-DOS 7.02 than I can with WIN95 DOS 7.0. Another thing that might
be a problem source is the use of DOS drivers to activate a device
running WIN95 DOS 7.0. I am trying to get my Iomega !Clik drive
(aka Pocket Zip drive) to be recognized under native DOS. So far
I can get the !Clik drive to work only under the Windows GUI or
within a "DOS-box". I use WIN95 drivers for this. I think the DOS
drivers read the DOS version number. If the drivers see WIN95 DOS
7.0 the drivers will refuse to do anything thinking that they are
the wrong drivers. Iomega does have DOS drivers for this device at
their web site. I downloaded them. They are said to operate under
DOS and also under WIN 3.x. I think the reason why they won't work
for me under WIN95 DOS 7.0 is that they aren't right for that DOS
version. For that reason I want to run my machine in real DOS mode
under DR-DOS. For my next experiment I will put the DOS drivers on
my floppy boot disk and see if I can run the drivers from the floppy
to activate the !Clik drive. Even if this works I will still have
to find some way to overcome the problem of my hard drive not being
recognized.
> SH> What I really want to do is to boot the computers with DR-DOS 7.02
> SH> from the A Drive. When I do this with one of my two computers the
> SH> hard drive isn't recognized. ("Invalid drive specification" error)
> hmmm .. Thomas has had such problems IMHO ... maybe he knows more about it.
> I haven't heared of such problems.
> SH> I have always been told that DOS has problems recognizing large hard
> SH> drive partitions if the machine has an old BIOS.
> These were BIOS problems.
> But many OSes like Linux or Windows NT, did not use the BIOS, so they could
> access the drive.
> SH> Various DOS versions also have different limitations as to the
> SH> maximum size hard drive partition it can recognize.
> ??? really ???
Yes, really. DOS 3.30 will not recognize hard drive partitions larger
than 32MB. Other versions (DOS 5.0, I think) will recognize partitions
only up to 512MB. There exist some special "BIOS overlay programs"
that you can install to the master boot record to overcome this problem.
The BIOS overlay programs are offered by hard drive manufacturers and
they are specific for certain brands and models of hard drives.
> IMHO not ... the max size for a fat16 partition is 2 GB.
I think you can use larger partitions than 2GB if you install a
suitable BIOS overlay program.
> SH> How can this be, and how can I fix the problem?
> Don't use DrDOS ... it seems like a bug in it.
I think I will have to use some version of DOS other than WIN95
DOS 7.0. There is a bug in this WIN version of DOS if it can't use
DOS drivers that will work with other DOS versions.
> I don't know any patch that would cure this drdos behaviour.
Regards,
Sam Heywood
-- This mail was written by user of The Arachne Browser - http://arachne.cz/
