Mail Archives: opendos/2000/09/18/09:06:13
----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Dye" <raster AT highfiber DOT com>
To: <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
Sent: Saturday, September 16, 2000 5:01 PM
Subject: Re: DRDOS FDISK
> At 06:29 PM 9/15/00 -0600, "Pat" wrote:
>
> >I would like to know hat problem people are having with DRDOS 7.03 FDiSk,
> >7.02 for that matter? I have been using it for several eyars now and
have
> >had no problems, in fact just the opposite.
>
> You haven't been using it to set up small hard drives, then.
> DR-DOS can create partitions that are big-time incompatible
> with MS-DOS, possibly resulting in trashed volumes if such
> drives are accessed by The Evil Empire DOS. I don't recall the
> size limit -- 127 megs, perhaps? -- but I'm pretty sure I first
> saw the problem on a Maxtor 7120.
I have a 345MB IDE drive on this system, partitioned into two partitions of
about 70MB and 255MB. I have had other size partitions ranging from 32MB for
the first and two at 127MB and whatever was left for the last partition. I
have at times put MS DoS v 6.0 and possibly 5.0 on this drive to check out
problems I was having with networking WFWG 3.11. I ran into no such problems
with MS DoS. However, MSDOS FDISK has been very flakey to say the least. I
made money on MS FDISK because of their screw up. For example, people were
told that they needed to update to MSDOS 5.0 from 3.x for their software to
function correctly. Unfortunately, when people upgraded to 5.0 and had
FDISKed with 3.x they had problems. 5.0 FDISK COULD NOT ERASE the 3.0
partition table!!!!! If you attempted to use 5.0 FDISK on the drive, you had
problems. The only soulution was to use 3.x FDISK and remove all partitions,
then boot to 5.0 and partition it with 5.0 FDISK. This sounds like maybe a
similar problem you are having. I would like to know what version(s) of MS
crap for DOS you are using and which DRDOS FDISK(s) you have used.
My old MFM drive, a Seagate ST-251, which was RLL'd to 64MB, had no prblems
either, however, back then I was using DRDOS 6.0. I could also switch to
MSDOS 5.0 with no problems.
I am really curious about this problem and would like to duplicate it and
see why there is a problem. I am a very astute student of DOS, partition
tables, boot sectors, etc. I look at the RAW data. There just isn't that
much that can go wrong. You have a maximum of four entries in the partition
table consisting of 32 bytes each. What can go wrong??? Well for one thing
MS crap for FDISK, plays musical chairs with the partition table and move
the four entries around. Yes that is right. I have had it mess with my Linux
partition designations by just merely changing the ACTIVE boot partition!!!
DRDOS FDISK on the other hand, always puts the EXTENDED DOS partition in the
fourth slot. Maybe this is what MS crap for DOS cannot handle. Maybe in
needs to play musical chairs with the partition table so it can do it's
stupidity!
> There are two bugs. Either one alone is pretty trivial, but
> both together are possibly disastrous. First, DR-DOS
> FDISK chooses cluster sizes poorly on very small drives.
> This by itself only creates excessive cluster overhang.
That may not be true. It may be using the MS crap for standards. MS FDISK
now selects a standard cluster size as 4 sectors i.e. 2048 bytes. I do not
recall which stupid version of MS DOS did this but believe it was 5.0. Thus
if you have a partition of <32MB, you will have a cluster size of 4 sectors
or 2048 bytes instead of a more reasonable 1 sector per cluster or 512 byes.
So I will agree on this point, but you can blame that on MS. Everytime DRI
did something to improve DOS, MS would deliberately make their software not
work. The biggest example of this was with DRDOS 5.0 and WINDOZE. MS WINDOZE
would recognize that the DRDOS EMM386 had been loaded and refuse to load
WINDOZE. DRI figured out what the MS crap for software was looking for in
the EMM386 code and made a patch for EMM386 so that WINDOZE would load. This
was deliberate and intentional by Gates and company. Caldera recently
settled a lawsuit with MS over this crap and many other illegal things MS
did to DRI. So I suspect Novell/Caldera used the stupid 4 cluster minimum to
keep up with the stupid MS standards so that MS software would run correctly
with DRDOS!!!!! Blame Gates for this!
> Second, it writes a strange OEM ID string. Something like
> "DRDOS 7" if memory serves. This ID string is probably
> purely cosmetic for DR-DOS, but MS-DOS uses it to decide
> whether or not to "trust" the values in the BIOS parameter
> block which specify (for example) the cluster size... and,
> indirectly, the start of the root directory....
That should not have any effect on anything, except possibly what I just
mentioned above and that some MS crap for software reads this info the choke
deliberately. I have had numerous identities there and never had a problem.
PCTools FORMAT.COM has it's own idetities for each version of PCTools. I
have used Linux to format drives. I have used OS/2 to format drives and many
others and have never encountered such a problem due to the identity string.
As far as any other things that are entered into the boot record when
formatting with DRDOS, Norton's NDD will catch anything wrong there and can
correct it. Norton's has never found a problem with formatting a drive with
DRDOS. However, there is a problem somewhere and I will address that later,
after replying to what you have written.
> Reading a small drive set up this way under MS-DOS is
> amusing and harmless. Writing to a drive set up this way
> under MS-DOS will probably trash disk structures and data.
> I do not recommend using the newer (Caldera) versions of
> FDISK. The one that shipped with Novell DOS 7 is probably
> okay.
Do me a favor, if you can. You can include it in a message here if you wish.
It will only take a few k of space or you can e-mail it directly to me. get
one of these drives that gets messed up with DRDOS and using MSDOS on them.
If you have Norton's utilities, use the DiSKEDIT command. You can leave it
in the default Read Only mode to do this and not have any fear of damaging
any information on the drive. Under the Onjects tab, select physical sector,
then make the following entries: Cylinder = 0, Head = 0, Sector = 1, Number
of sectors or length or whatever the very bottom entry is = 1. Then hit crtl
W or use the edit menu tab and select write, then select write to a file and
write it to a file with a name like C:\DRMBR.BIN. The go back to the Objects
tab abd select BOOT SECTOR, you can also do the by alt B key. Then select
Write from the edit menu or ctrl W and select write to a file then write it
to a file name like this C:\BOOTSECT.BIN, then either attach these two files
located in the root directory of drive C: in an e-mail to me or just copy
the text inside these files to a message. Each file will be 512 bytes in
length and will consist of 1024 characters each.
If you are attempting to use DOS 3.31 or earlier you may well have problems.
Also I have found that many of the earlier versions of DOS including 3.31
cannot read my HDDs when I boot them from floppy. I never did mess with that
louse 4.x version of MSDOS. never did see anything worthwhile in that
version. I have a copy of in, but have never even bothered to ever install
it. Not even once! Who knows what might happen with that version. Probably
the best and most stable version of MSDOS was 5.0. Most people that use DOS,
use that version. They only go to 6.2xxxxx whatever it was/is for WINDOZE
3.1xxxxx crap. (probably needed for the so-called 32 bit versions of WINDOZE
3.1xxxxx)
> I have explained the problem to Caldera. They understand it
> and have agreed that it could cause data loss. No fixed
> version has been forthcoming. If you want a free FDISK, I'd
> recommend Brian Reifsnyder's (sp?) FreeDOS FDISK. He
> is actively developing it, and is interested in bug reports.
>
> raster AT highfiber DOT com
I might check it out, but as I have said, I have never run across any
problems with DRDOS FDISK, even when installing MSDOS. However, I don't
recall if I ever did install 6.2xxxxx whatever it was version. I think I
gave up on WINDOZE 3.11 WFWG networking before I got that version. I know I
could not get it to work correctly or at all with DRDOS
7.0/7.01/7.02/7.03/MSDOS 6.0.
Also, from the problems you described, with the exception of cluster size,
it would appear not to be an FDISK problem, but a FORMAT problem. Keep this
in mind: When you FDISK with DRDOS FDISK, it will FORMAT the partition IF
you tell it to do a thorough check of the drive. I USUALLY will do a manual
FORMAT /U /X anyway after using FDISK. I don't know if this would cause you
a problem. Many years ago, I kept running into problems with MSDOS systems
and developed my own method of partitoning and formatting hard drives and
use it to this day. This may account for my not having problems that you
describe. I'll list my sequence of actions here:
1. FDISK, remove all unwanted partitions and logical drives.
2. Exit FDISK and COLD BOOT the computer. i.e. turn
off the computer and turn back on.
3. FDISK and create the partitions you want.
4. Exit FDISK and COLD BOOT the computer.
5. Format using the /X /U parameters. (There is no /X for MS as far as I
know. that is a safety feature for DRDOS to format a fixed drive.
6. If it is to be the boot drive for an MS OS then also include the /S
switch.
I have either heard of or ran across something about using SYS.COM to
install the system files. I cannot recall what it was now, nor what DOS or
version of DOS may have had some problem with it. I have used so many
different versions of DOS: Compaq, WYSE, FreeDOS, RTXDOS, TANDY DOS, MSDOS,
DRDOS, and many others that I cannot even remeber them all. There is also
one other step I use if I have had a problem, and I do use this after I have
removed MS WINDOZE crap. I'll call it step zero:
0. Use a DiSKEDITor and zero out the entire first track of the drive. this
can also be done with debug and somewhere I have the step by step prceedure
to do this with debug. I have even helped people over the phone that did not
have a disk editor and told them step by step how to do this with DEBUG.
I have even zeroed out a whole drive. I normally use something like Norton's
SPEEDISK or PCTools COMPRESS to do this after I have formatted the drive. I
tell these programs to clear all sectors. One of the writes 00 00's to all
sectors and the other one writes FF 00's to all unused sectors. The
exception to this is the system areas and I use a disk editor to complete
the job after norton or PCTools is done. You could use WIPEDISK to do it,
but that takes forever, just as a diskeditor would take forever you zero out
the whole drive or partition.
This is sometimes required if a virus has attacked your system. Since
normally only the first sector of the first track is ever used by MS or DOS
stuff, a virus can be implanted into this normally unused area. Since I
consider MS crap and easpecially WINDOZE a virus, I zero out track 0!!!!!
Actually WINDOZE really isn't a virus. Viruses do something!!!!!!
Pat
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