Hi all,
I’ve just noticed a minor issue/wierdness with FDISK.
It is not a serious problem. It is just something it does not do that the
Microsoft version does do. Mostly just a little interesting.
Some back story… Several years ago, I took my Pentium Pro motherboard out of
it’s original massive 3 foot tall full tower server case and stuck it into a 2U
rack mount chassis. But, this forced me to use a PCI riser and only PCI cards.
Well, a few days ago I was fed up with trying to get good sound support with
the mostly working PCI sound card. So, I ripped it out of that case, grabbed
some other components I had laying around and stuffed it into a different
modern full tower case (only 19” tall). Pulled my Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold card
out of the 486 docking station and plugged it into one of the Pentium Pro’s ISA
slots. Yippie, good sound in DOS games.
I mainly use the machine for testing stuff. But, I’ve got a lot of games and
software from the Win 9X days. So, I’m going to set it up for booting FreeDOS,
MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS, OpenDOS, Win98SE. Maybe even do different versions like
PC-DOS 7/2000, MS-DOS 3.3/5.0/6.22, etc.
The first step in this process was to install MS-DOS 6.2. Which, I decided to
record as a video.
The Pentium Pro has two hard disk drives. A #1-160GB and a #2-40GB, both are
seen by the BIOS as 8GB. Under DOS, they work fine this way as 8GB drives.
(Under linux, their full capacity is available).
To my surprise, the MS-DOS installer automatically partitioned and formatted
both drives. The #2 drive is very slow. Also, I don’t really even want it
visible under MS-DOS.
Now we’ll get into the issue I noticed...
So, I zero’d the MBR on hard disks #1 & #2.
Booted FreeDOS and ran FDISK 1.3.4.
Created an extended partition on #2 using all space (8040mb FAT32)
Rebooted MS-DOS installer.
It partitioned and reboot.
It automatically started formatting drive C:
Then formatted drive D:, huh?
Quit setup program and launched MS 6.2’s FDISK.
Drive C: Fine.
Partition C: 1, PRI DOS, 2047mb, FAT16, 26%
Total disk space is 8025 Mbytes (1 Mbyte = 1048576 bytes)
Drive D: Is a little interesting.
Partition 1, Non-DOS, 8033mb, 100% usage
Partition 2, PRI DOS, 8mb, 0% usage
Total disk space is 8025 Mbytes (1 Mbyte = 1048576 bytes)
Interesting that MS created a 8mb partition, when the Non-DOS partition is
already using 8mb more than the disk has available.
Rebooted FreeDOS.
Ran FDISK.
Deleted the Drive #2, partition #2, PRI DOS FAT 12 partition.
Could not create a new partition.
Rebooted and ran MS installer, it repartitioned D: adding the 8mb FAT12
Partition.
Ran FreeDOS FDISK under MS-DOS. Reports:
Drive 1
Partition C: 1, Active, PRI DOS, NO NAME, 2055mb, FAT16, 26%
Total space 8048mb
Drive 2
Partition 1, EXT DOS, 8040mb, Extended, 100%
Partition D: 2, PRI DOS, 16mb, FAT12, 0%
Total space 8048mb
Logical… Drive E:, 8040mb, FAT32ext, 100%
To summarize… While all the numbers are different and neither seem to add up,
the main difference was Microsoft’s FDISK was utilizing that little bit of
extra space and the “end” of disk #2.
Strange.
:-)
Jerome
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