From:	mert0407 AT sable DOT ox DOT ac DOT uk (George Foot)
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: Exclusive access to drive
Date:	5 Jun 1997 12:27:11 GMT
Organization:	Oxford University, England
Message-ID:	<5n6bav$l1f@news.ox.ac.uk>
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NNTP-Posting-Host:	sable.ox.ac.uk
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To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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Eli Zaretskii (eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il) wrote:

: On Tue, 3 Jun 1997, Mike A. Harris wrote:

: > Hmmm.  Where do you think the problem lies then?  CHKDSK? or
: > DJGPP, or DPMI?

: I'm clueless.  When CHKDSK is run from a DJGPP program, it should be no
: different from it running from the DOS box.  DPMI has no effect on CHKDSK
: unless Microsoft have explicitly made it check for its presence (and even
: then I don't understand why should it care).  When our programs run on
: Windows 95, they don't even have an open file, since the page file is
: managed by Windows, so there really is no problem related to the
: filesystem integrity.  That's why I said that it seems like they wanted it
: to be too safe. 

Hmm, I've been following this for a while, and I just booted into Win95
and tried a few things I haven't seen discussed yet. Firstly I confirmed
the problem existed on my system. Then, I wrote a short program which
waited for a keypress, and tried running chkdsk in another DOS box - it
worked fine. Then, I made a program to system("command") and ran chkdsk
from that command prompt. The problem recurred.

These show a few things:

1) It's not just Windows' reaction to running DPMI programs (chkdsk still
works when a DPMI program is running)

2) It's not because chkdsk is being directly spawned by the DPMI program

I also tried using PFE to execute CHKDSK (worked fine) and to start a DOS
prompt and chkdsk there (again, it worked fine).

Perhaps someone with Watcom could try a similar program there and see
whether it suffers the same way?

-- 
George Foot <mert0407 AT sable DOT ox DOT ac DOT uk>
Merton College, Oxford

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