From:	"Matthias Paul" <MPAUL AT ibh DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
Organization:	IBH, RWTH-Aachen
To:	opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net
Date:	Tue, 25 Mar 1997 16:51:23 GMT+0100
Subject:	Re: floppy disks
Reply-to:	Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de
Message-ID:	<17EE893AC7@ibh.rwth-aachen.de>

On Mon, 24 Mar 1997 16:31:48, Sylphid wrote:
> i heard a couple of you guys talking about having problems with 
> floppy disks with opendos .. i was at a friend's house with my 
> pooter trying to copy some files on 1.44MB floppies, and i kept
> on getting I/O erros.  is this the same as you experienced?
> 
> of course, it could just be my hardware .. i don't trust most 
> parts of my computer at all.

I have never experienced these problems on my systems running
Novell DOS, but I heard of someone, who had similar problems 
with a harddisk, which was fixed with one of the earlier 
Novell DOS updates.  While so far I assume that OpenDOS 7.01 
can be compared best with Novell DOS Update 13, this might not be 
the case for all fixes (someone from Caldera was needed to clarify 
the status of the software).  So, these are only some guesses to 
get more some information on you problems:


Have you overspeeded your mainboard?  (Many older 386 boards suffer 
from DMA 'dropouts', if they've run at higher speed for some time.)
If you have a turbo switch, do these errors occur in slow mode?
Try to slow down your DMA and bus timing in CMOS setup.

Do you have EMM386 installed?  If so, does the errors disappear 
without EMM386 installed?  If so, try to fiddle with the /DMASIZE=kb
option.  Does CONFIG.SYS DOS=LOW fix your problems?  If so, try to
place the BUFFERS= in low memory, not in the HMA or UMBs, that is, 
not using HIBUFFERS= and not using DOS=HIGH, and/or UMB during this 
test.  By the way, what are your BUFFERS=, FILES=, and FCBS= 
settings?  Is SHARE loaded, are you running under TASKMGR or Windows?

If these do not fix your problems, try to set the undocumented 
CONFIG.SYS directive DEBLOCK=0000.  (For details on this and all the
other undocumented switches, have a look at my NWDOSTIP.TXT from 
my MPDOSTIP.ZIP package.)

If floppies do fine after these tests, tell us your results, 
and we might better guess, where to search for a permanent fix.

Bye,

 Matthias
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