Mail Archives: opendos/1997/04/18/09:40:52
On Fri, 18 Apr 97 22:26 Lorier replied to Mark Habersack:
> >P.S. Matthias, the undocumented /T switch to command.com causes
> >command.com to reload itself when it finds a certain type of TSR
> >(I think that it should be a multitasker)
If so, this should tell us something... ;-)
>What type of TSR?
>Hmm... Anyone have any idea what "Multipath=" or something in
>Config.sys in Dos6.2 is for?
[MULTITRACK]
You probably meant MULTITRACK=, didn't you? This directive allows to
enable/disable multi-sector access at the INT 13h interrupt. While
MULTITRACK=ON is the faster default, some systems with old BIOSes,
imporper VDS, weird SCSI drives, and some PS/2 machines require
MULTITRACK=OFF.
If I understand this well, under Novell DOS and OpenDOS you can
achieve the same (or at least similar) results using the undocumented
DEBLOCK=xxxx directive. Since I have written about it several times
in the official caldera mailing list and in opendos AT delorie DOT com,
I'll do only a short summary here (for more details, please have a
look at the mailing list archives or at my MPDOSTIP.ZIP...):
DEBLOCK=FFFF (the new default) can be compared with MULTITRACK=ON
DEBLOCK=A000 (old default)
DEBLOCK=0000 can be compared with MULTITRACK=OFF
The hex-value is the segment address where to stop multi-sector
access, and some systems require it not to be in paged memory.
Of course, DEBLOCK=0000 is much slower than DEBLOCK=FFFF, since all
file-io has to routed through a single-sector deblocking buffer in
low memory.
[COMMAND /T]
Well, option /T works with or without a TASKMGR installed.
It requires, that the currently running command processor
(where typing in COMMAND /T) also is COMMAND.COM. It will
crash, if 4DOS is the current command processor (of course,
4DOS *can* be an underlaying command processor). COMMAND.COM's
behaviour of stacking batchjobs on giving /T is IMHO only useful
in conjunction with the TASKMGR ('T' like 'T'ASKMGR, 'T'ask, or
'T'erminate).
Because I have not yet seen this test for a special 'TSR' in
my COMMAND.COM disassembly (which - I must admit - is uncomplete
due to hard disk space limitations on my current systems), which
install check is tested than by COMMAND.COM?
However, if it actually checks for the multitasker, this really
might be one of the causes for the problems with 4DOS...
Bye,
Matthias
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