Mail Archives: opendos/1997/12/08/11:09:54
On 97/12/05 Chris Wilson asked:
>I recently
>installed a 3 1/2 disk drive on it. 720K disks work fine, but I get a
>"sector not found" error or "general error" when trying to use 1.44 MB
>disks. Using the /I switch on DRIVPARM is supposed to install some sort
>of software driver to allow old BIOSes to access 1.44 MB drives.
No, DRIVPARM= does not install any additional software, it just changes
the internal settings of the already installed driver for the corresponding
floppy drive.
> The/I switch is documented in DOSBook, but when I actually add it in the
>CONFIG.SYS file, I get an error when OpenDOS starts.
>What happend to the I switch?
Well, the whole story is, /I has never been implemented in DR DOS,
Novell DOS, nor OpenDOS... It is (or was???) available in MS-DOS to
"assume electrical equivalent drives". At the moment, I have no idea
what the actual difference could be. (If somebody knows, please tell me!)
>Also, is it supported in Matthias Paul's IBMBIO.COM?
No, for the same reason. BTW, my IBMBIO.COM ALPHA3 is outdated
now (it s still available for documentation purposes only): an improved
version of ALPHA4 ships with OpenDOS 7.02 BETA2+.
Your DRIVPARM= line should looks similar to:
DRIVPARM=/D:? [/C] /F:7 [/H:2] [/S:18] [/T:80]
(/H:, /S:, and /T: are optional and usually not needed)
If this (or one of its permutations) does not fix your problem, your BIOS
is probably outdated. There are several possible solutions:
- (Update your ROM-BIOS). Well, not very convenient...
- Maybe your drive has several jumpers for different operating modes.
In the early days, obsure floppy drives and controllers existed, maybe
changing jumper settings could help. Make sure you don t have a
Japanese "3mode" drive, they run at different speed and only support
1,2MB (but look like 1,4MB drives).
- Try DEVICE=c:\opendos\DRIVER.SYS
instead of DRIVPARM=. This will actually load a new driver for your floppy
drive, creating a new drive letter, under which it will be accessable.
The calling syntax should be similar to DRIVPARM=. However, as with
DRIVPARM= you will not be able to boot from this drive in 1,4MB mode.
- With his 2M 3.x high-formatter, Ciriaco Garķa de Celis provides an optional
driver named 2M-XBIOS.EXE. It fully replaces the ROM-BIOS floppy disk
code by emulating an AMI-BIOS of 1993 in this respect. Depending on your
system, you may need to install it with the /13 parameter, like
DEVICE=c:\sys\fdd\2m.30\2m-xbios.exe a:4 [b:?] [/13]
I have made very good experiences with this driver.
Hope, this helps.
Matthias
------------------------------------------------------------
Matthias Paul
eMail: <Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
Web: http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html
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