X-Apparently-From: Message-ID: <000301c03dea$c4fa8d50$a28a1004@dbcooper> From: "Patrick Moran" To: References: <20000918 DOT 151710 DOT -577105 DOT 0 DOT domanspc AT juno DOT com> Subject: Re: DRDOS FDISK Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 17:00:59 -0600 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.3018.1300 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.3018.1300 Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert W Moss" To: 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 _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com