Hi, A couple of weeks ago I succeeded, with help of this list, in partitioning, formatting and installing Freedos in the hard disk of a portable computer.
However, when trying to do the same in a second machine (Compaq Armada, 1999) it became clear that what I had previously written in this list about overheating was not quite right. After some 10 hours of experimentation in the last few days, and hundreds of corrupted files, I came to the conclusions below. 1. The one thing that completely stopped file corruption with the second computer was changing the kernel from 16-bit to 32-bit, both version 2039. Actually, this had also been the case with the first computer -- only, I had not noticed it at the time. Note that only the kernel is now 32-bit; the file system is still FAT16 LBA. The 16-bit kernel seems to work well in desktops though; I only observed the problem in the two portables. 2. Overheating may or may not have had a role in corrupting files. With the second machine I took precautions, such as running FDAPM correctly, and placing an extra cooler fan blowing air directly onto the processor heat radiator through the opening under the machine. In spite of that, hundreds of corrupted files continued to appear as long as the 16-bit kernel was there, and completely disappeared the minute it was replaced by the 32-bit one. 3. MS-SmartDrive is probably not a good idea in this context. (Perhaps everyone except me knew it already.) It produced hundreds corrupted files, but of a different kind. The "advantage" was that they could be corrected (in fact, deleted) by DosFsCk; the file system would return to a perfect condition, and I just had to copy again the deleted files -- without SmartDrive, of course. Corrupted files from the 16-bit kernel could not be corrected or deleted, and the only way was to reformat the disk. The reason why I tried to use SmartDrive in the first place was that I thought that, with so many files being written, a write-cache might be helpful. The conclusion, apparently, is that there is either some problem with the 16-bit kernel itself, or some incompatibility between it and the hardware or software I have been using. There is also something about Fdisk. On exiting, it gives the error message: "Error Reading Hard Disk: Function number or drive not permitted. Program Terminated." However, as far as I could observe, partitioning is correctly done, and everything works fine in spite of the error message. Perhaps the error message itself is wrong. Now both my portable computers are running perfectly. Their file systems are OK, as checked by DosFsCk and ChkDsk. In addition, both can be defragmented by Defrag, and as we know Defrag will refuse to work if it finds errors in the file system. I have since copied, edited and deleted many files, without any damage whatsoever to folders or files. As far as I'm concerned, the problems are solved :-) I'm reporting this just in case it is of interest to other users, or perhaps to developers. Regards, Marcos -------------------------------------- Marcos Favero Florence de Barros Campinas, Brazil ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start uncovering the many advantages of virtual appliances and start using them to simplify application deployment and accelerate your shift to cloud computing. http://p.sf.net/sfu/novell-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
