Message-Id: Date: Mon, 08 Dec 1997 15:59:44 +0000 From: Matthias Paul To: opendos AT delorie DOT com, paul-ma AT reze-1 DOT rz DOT rwth-aachen DOT de Subject: Re: Questions About DRIVPARM and TaskMgr Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Precedence: bulk On 97/12/05 Chris Wilson asked: >I recently >installed a 3 1/2 disk drive on it. 720K disks work fine, but I get a >"sector not found" error or "general error" when trying to use 1.44 MB >disks. Using the /I switch on DRIVPARM is supposed to install some sort >of software driver to allow old BIOSes to access 1.44 MB drives. No, DRIVPARM= does not install any additional software, it just changes the internal settings of the already installed driver for the corresponding floppy drive. > The/I switch is documented in DOSBook, but when I actually add it in the >CONFIG.SYS file, I get an error when OpenDOS starts. >What happend to the I switch? Well, the whole story is, /I has never been implemented in DR DOS, Novell DOS, nor OpenDOS... It is (or was???) available in MS-DOS to "assume electrical equivalent drives". At the moment, I have no idea what the actual difference could be. (If somebody knows, please tell me!) >Also, is it supported in Matthias Paul's IBMBIO.COM? No, for the same reason. BTW, my IBMBIO.COM ALPHA3 is outdated now (it s still available for documentation purposes only): an improved version of ALPHA4 ships with OpenDOS 7.02 BETA2+. Your DRIVPARM= line should looks similar to: DRIVPARM=/D:? [/C] /F:7 [/H:2] [/S:18] [/T:80] (/H:, /S:, and /T: are optional and usually not needed) If this (or one of its permutations) does not fix your problem, your BIOS is probably outdated. There are several possible solutions: - (Update your ROM-BIOS). Well, not very convenient... - Maybe your drive has several jumpers for different operating modes. In the early days, obsure floppy drives and controllers existed, maybe changing jumper settings could help. Make sure you don t have a Japanese "3mode" drive, they run at different speed and only support 1,2MB (but look like 1,4MB drives). - Try DEVICE=c:\opendos\DRIVER.SYS instead of DRIVPARM=. This will actually load a new driver for your floppy drive, creating a new drive letter, under which it will be accessable. The calling syntax should be similar to DRIVPARM=. However, as with DRIVPARM= you will not be able to boot from this drive in 1,4MB mode. - With his 2M 3.x high-formatter, Ciriaco Garķa de Celis provides an optional driver named 2M-XBIOS.EXE. It fully replaces the ROM-BIOS floppy disk code by emulating an AMI-BIOS of 1993 in this respect. Depending on your system, you may need to install it with the /13 parameter, like DEVICE=c:\sys\fdd\2m.30\2m-xbios.exe a:4 [b:?] [/13] I have made very good experiences with this driver. Hope, this helps. Matthias ------------------------------------------------------------ Matthias Paul eMail: Web: http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html