Date: Mon, 28 Jul 1997 13:27:46 +0100 From: Matthias Paul Subject: Re: floppy-copy errors To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Reply-to: Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de Message-id: <95370437CF@reze-1.rz.rwth-aachen.de> Organization: Rechenzentrum RWTH Aachen Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Precedence: bulk On Fri, 25 Jul 1997, Bill Currie replied to Bruce A. Locke: > > >> AD&D (two games of the series): > > >> Error message: Packed File is Corrupt > ... > Are they .exe files? If so, maybe opendos has problems with segment > relocations under certain circumstances. I've been having > similar problems with IDA (interactive disassembler) complaining that > it's been corrupted. > > My *GUESS* (wild and hairy as they come) is that maybe these problem > programs have negative relocations in them (I've seen some that do, > but mostly for the program entry point in compressed exes) and maybe > opendos chokes on these. Not bad... ;-) It's some kind of a paradoxon: Usually (if not actually a corrupted file) the "Packed file corrupt!" problem can be tracked down to a file been compressed with the MS EXEPACK utility, which for a long time had a design flaw that caused this error to occur, when a program is executed in the very first 64KB of memory. This was encountered first when the loadhigh features were implemented into DOS, freeing more conventional memory, and thus giving programs a TPA which starts in the lowest 64KB. Using DR DOS 5.0+, Novell DOS, or OpenDOS, you can disable the usage of the so called "low memory" by typing MEMMAX -L before executing any such program. (Under MS-DOS/PC-DOS you can do the same on a file by file basis by using the LOADFIX command.) If the problem disappears, a permament fix is to uncompress the EXEPACKed program, e.g. by various utilities from the Internet archives. If I remember well, Fabrice Bellard's compressor also had an option to uncompress EXEPACKed files and compress them using his own utility. Don't know about PKLITE right now... Hope, this could help... Matthias -------------------------------------------------------------------- Snail mail: Matthias Paul, Ubierstrasse 28, D-50321 Bruehl, Germany New eMail : Web : URL: http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html --------------------------------------------------------------------