Mail Archives: opendos/2001/05/31/22:14:39
On 2001-05-29, Richard <fishy DOT nun AT virgin DOT net> wrote:
> I installed dr-dos 7.03 on a 386pc (precisely, a Compaq prolinea
> 386/20e) a couple of days ago. When I press the hotkeys for
> multitasking, screen goes blank, nothing responds after that.
>
> Ive experimented a little; plain task switching WITHOUT emm386
> works fine.
> When emm386 IS active, I still get a menu for plain task switching,
> but it never changes--
I understand that you cannot use the pre-emptive multitasker, but
that the task-switcher kind of works in your configuration, right?
A general pre-requisite for the multitasker to run tasks in background
is that you must have a 386 with at least 4 Mb of extended memory and
must load EMM386.EXE with the /MULTI option, otherwise it will
only allow for task switching. If you did not already, try this.
In case you run into crashes, you can still start the task-*switcher*
by using TASKMGR /S in this situation.
Since you are using a Compaq machine and seem to be experiencing
a problem with upper memory, add /COMPAQ=OFF to the
DEVICE=EMM386.EXE ... line in [D]CONFIG.SYS.
I also suggest to add /VERBOSE=DEBUG so you will get more
verbose startup messages, which might help to track down what´s
going wrong.
>I can add new tasks, (which persist, insomuch
> as if e.g. I invoke the editor on a file, that file is reported as still
> open; so I cant edit it in a later task) but theres no way of getting
> back to the previous task.
??? Sorry, I don´t understand what you are doing here...
How do you add new tasks, via command line or via INS hotkey
from within the CTRL+ESC menu? Who reports the file to be
still open when you cannot switch tasks? Are you using a 3rd party
shell like 4DOS? What´s the contents of the Exec= directive in
TASKMGR.INI? Have you changed the TASKMGR hotkeys
in the TASKMGR.INI file?
Please report your [D]CONFIG.SYS, AUTODOS7.BAT/
AUTOEXEC.BAT and TASKMGR.INI files, and forward
a MEM /A output, so we can learn about your memory layout
and programs involved.
In particular, I would like to see a MEM /A output after
a F5 clean boot, and one in your normal configuration.
> I "solved" this by excluding C000-FFFF on the config.sys emm386
> line. (It will perhaps be apparent that *I dont know what Im doing*?)
> After this, though, task switching works again.
OK, this indicates a problem with your upper memory usage.
You can try to narrow the excluded area until the problem occurs.
What are the adapters installed into your computer, anything that
is using memory mapped I/O like (SMC?) network adapters or
some graphics cards?
In this case you must manually exclude these areas which are
used for memory mapped I/O as EMM386 might have difficulties
to detect them automatically.
Greetings,
Matthias
--
Matthias Paul, Ubierstrasse 28, D-50321 Bruehl, Germany
mailto:<Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>; mailto:<mpaul AT drdos DOT org>
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html; http://mpaul.drdos.org
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