Mail Archives: opendos/2000/10/24/16:38:17
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert W Moss" <domanspc AT juno DOT com>
To: <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
Sent: Monday, September 18, 2000 3:55 PM
Subject: Re: DRDOS FDISK
> Thanks guys. We have not had this much traffic for months. I thought
> everyone had
> gone into hibernation.
>
> I have not used the newest versions of DRDOS but I have used 3.1 & 5.0 &
> 6.0 & NDOS7.
> I only had troubles with 5.0 when upgrading from MSDOS2.11 /3.3.
This is the same problem you also had with MSDOS 5.0. DR probably had to do
this to be compatible with MSDOS. This problem may also have occured with
MSDOS 4.x, but I never did find anyone that ever used it. If they had it on
their system, they would go back to 3.3.
> Another funny thing was that when installing DRDOS5.0 it formatted your
> hard disk and you lost everything on the drive. If you were upgrading
> you had to backup all your application data files and reinstall all your
> apps, then restore your data files.
This is most likely related to the above mentioned problem. The drive would
probably have to be reformatted. In short, here are some of the basic
problems. In 3.3 you could not have a drive size larger than 32MB. The
primary partition and logical drives could not exceed 32MB. When later DOS
came out, you could have larger cluster sizes. Unfortunately, Gates' and
company made the smallest default cluster size 4 sectors (2048 bytes.)
However, if you used a thrid party program like Disk Manager, you could use
smaller cluster sizes. The smallest that can be used for FAT 16 are as
follows: 32MB 1 sector, 64MB 2 scetors, 128MB 4 sectors, 512MB 8 sectors...
So if you were using 3.3 or ealier and had 512 bytes/1 secotor per cluster,
it would have to be changed to 4 sectors per cluster with newer versions of
DOS. This was another Gates' screw up. Guess I should not complain, because
I made money on this screw up and had to redo a lot of hard drives for
people. But is still was stupidity.
Also: Even today's DOSes still have FAT 12 and 8 sectors per cluster for
small partitions. (Somewhere around 10-15MB partitions and smaller until you
get down to diskette size partitions!.)
Pat
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