Date: Mon, 22 Jun 92 15:00:32 EDT
From: DJ Delorie <dj AT ctron DOT com>
To: dao AT d62iggy DOT mitre DOT org
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu, umminger AT math DOT berkeley DOT edu
Subject: Re: hard disk gone

To settle the masses, it has been noted in a past discussion that some
systems are prone to giving bad data back from the drive (or to the
drive) under heavy load, regardless of the application performing the
request. (That's settling?)  Go32, under paging load, does a *lot* of
access, and MSDOS/BIOS/Hardware just can't get it right, and the disk
gets bad data written to it.

In the case of go32, providing enough memory to prevent paging will
limit the number of accesses requested.  Go32 never uses BIOS to write
to the disk, just DOS calls.  Most disk crashes are due to FAT
problems, which is not caused directly by go32, but by the amount of
traffic.

It's bad when a disk gets confused.  I always keep NDD.EXE and
CHKDSK.EXE on a bootable floppy just in case, and I've had to use them
on more than a few occasions, and not all for go32 development.

DJ
dj AT ctron DOT com
Life is a banana.