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Date:	Wed, 16 Jun 2004 20:58:22 -0400 (EDT)
From:	"Paul O. BARTLETT" <bartlett AT smart DOT net>
To:	opendos AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: Random Lockups with DR-DOS 7.03
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    Folks, I am afraid that I've gotten in over my head here.  Several
years ago, when I had a different, and more powerful, computer, I
partitioned the drive (with Partition Magic from Win98) and installed
DR-DOS 7.03 on one partition.  Everything went well, but before I could
do much with it, the power supply blew out and took a lot of the
hardware with it.  (Because I am poor, a kind soul gave me another
machine.)

    As I said when I started this thread, I basically did the same
thing on this (other) computer.  But things keep going from bad to
worse, and I think I am so much out of my depth that I may just have to
give up any idea of using two OS's on this machine (as much as I liked
DOS and am coming to dislike Win98).

    This afternoon I was getting the same results as I have had in the
past, random lockups.  So I decided to try to boot and use the native
DR-DOS COMMAND.COM instead of NDOS to see what would happen.  Now all
h*** has broken loose.

    I went into CONFIG.SYS and commented out the line SHELL= specifying
NDOS and uncommented the line for SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM.  Unfortunately,
perhaps, through a lack of attention, I forgot to comment out of
AUTOEXEC.BAT any lines that would have required NDOS to be loaded as
the command processor.

    When I booted, once it got to the command prompt the system went
berserk.  Black screen with a cursor racing madly everywhere across the
screen.  Then the printer (HP laser on the parallel port) started
spitting out pages with nothing but C:> about every twenty lines or so.

    I booted with an emergency floppy, and the partitions are now
messed up.  They *were* as follows:

127MB FAT: at the front of the disk, DR-DOS installed, bootable
511MB FAT: logical in an extended of the same size, visible to both
           DR-DOS and Win98 (D: to both)
balance of the HDD: FAT32, Win98 installed, bootable

Unfortunately, the 127MB FAT partition at the front of the disk is now
hidden.  DR-DOS cannot see it if I boot from a floppy.  I can FDISK
from the floppy, but I really don't know enough about FDISK to do any
repairs that way (and any documentation in the DR-DOS "DOSBOOK" is
currently unreachable).  If at all possible I would like to salvage
that partition, because I had already started loading stuff on it.

    Booted into Win98 and fired up Partition Magic (v5.0).  Partition
Magic will let me unhide it, but just before I tell it to do so, it
comes up with a dire warning, "OS/2 and Windows 95/98 do not support
multiple visible primary partitions.  If you unhide this partition and
then boot OS/2 or Windows 95/98, data loss can occur."  So I chickened
out.  (P.S. I have been using the Boot Magic boot manager that comes
with Partition Magic.  I can still attempt to boot into DR-DOS on the
first partition, but, as I say, things go berserk.)

    What started out as a simple project to install a congenial DOS has
turned out to be a can of worms.  I am over my head and am wondering if
I should just give up and resign myself to Windows.  I guess
non-specialists are just supposed to be slaves of Bill Gates (or go to
Mac).

    Thanks.

-- 
Paul Bartlett
bartlett "at" smart "dot" net
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