Message-ID: <000001c24406$7eef4de0$c03dfea9@atlantis> From: "Matthias Paul" To: References: Subject: Re: DRDOS 7.03 Woes Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 20:31:36 +0200 Organization: Aachen University of Technology (RWTH), Germany MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4522.1200 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by delorie.com id g7F2pNq07665 Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com On 2002-08-13, Joe Smith wrote: > However DRDOS 7.03 only seems to recognise 64MB of RAM. > Is this normal? Is there an explanation? What do I need to do? This is normal. As a 32-bit implementation, DR-DOS 7.03 EMM386 will support much more memory, but since it does not query the new BIOS API for more than 64 Mb, it will not be able to detect more memory by itself. More memory was not common when DR-DOS 7.03 was released. You can easily circumvent this by loading an external XMS provider, which supports more than 64 Mb of memory, before EMM386.EXE. For example, the MS-DOS 7+ HIMEM.SYS will work fine. EMM386 will display a non-fatal warning, that this would be a sub-optimal solution. In fact it is compared to having the detection code built into EMM386 itself, however, it is the only way to get it working with the published driver. Depending on the other EMM386 options you use, you may be able to suppress the warning with the /QUIET=HIMEM option. In case this gives you a fatal error message instead of removing the non-fatal-message, you will have to remove that option again and live with the warning. Search the archives of this list at http://www.delorie.com, the memory manager tech docs at http://www.freedos.org, or DR-DOS related sites like http://www.drdos.org and http://www.drdos.net, where this is explained in all details. > Also I am seeing EMM386.EXE protection errors from time to time... > Any assistance on EMM386.EXE set up would be appreciated. Protection faults are usually due to some memory or driver conflict. In many cases the reason is some hardware using memory mapped I/O in the adapter range, which is difficult to detect by the memory manager, so it might need some help in order to include and exclude the right areas. Without more detailed information about your system and your current configuration files ([D]CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT/AUTODOS7.BAT) and a memory map (MEM /A), we won't be able to help you much beyond general tips, which you can also find discussed at great length in the above mentioned places. For a start, try excluding the whole adapter range /EXCLUDE=C800-EFFF. If this helps, you can successively reduce the excluded area downto a minimum. You may also compare the memory map under DR-DOS EMM386 with that under MS-DOS/PC DOS EMM386 and in case, MS-DOS/PC DOS EMM386 does not use an area, the DR-DOS memory manager uses, you may try to exlcude this area under DR-DOS. If the crashes occur in specific situations, for example, only when loading a specific program, check if the program is using any kind of DOS extender. Some DOS extenders may require special EMM386 configuration options like /PIC=ON|OFF /DPMI=ON|OFF /MULTI=ON|OFF. Some DOS extenders (for example older versions of the CauseWay DOS extender) require restubbing (can be done in the field) before they will work under DR-DOS EMM386. Hope it helps, Matthias -- ; http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html; http://mpaul.drdos.org "Programs are poems for computers."