I played around with the, now freeware, combi program --a combined ram disk and disk cache. I loved having a auto resizable ram disk that would never be too small. I did not love that combi takes up perhaps 1/3 more ram than say, smartdrv would for a comperable sized disk cache. The latter is a little hard to measure since a lot of combi can be loaded in ``high'' memory -- the first 64K or so of XMS memory. However the reason Im posting is that combi did some minor damage to my file system, apparently after having a hard time handling the 32-bit extended program, yarn (the news/mail reader). Yarn uses the pmode 32-bit dos extender. I suspect the 32-bit extenders came on the dos scene after combi was written, at least some of them. Anyway, some of my directory link chains were truncated, and one small ini file was damaged, creating some unusual beeps when I ran some programs. All became well after I tracked down the offending file and fixed the directory info. with scandisk. However, I came across a remarkable entry about combi within somebody's ``best files'' list. On the negative(!) side he said about combi, ``sometimes destroys both fats'' !!! Therefore, I suggest those of you playing with combi, ease into write cache-ing slowly, make backups if possible, and if nothing else make a recent copy of your FAT table, each time you start your surv-pc, using combi (I do it always). Let us know what you find out. To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies.
