On Thu, 28 Feb 2002, Tony Duell wrote:
On the PC/XT (and possibly the PC), it's even
stranger. If you set the
DIP switches for 4 drives (in which case the machine assumes they're all
360K 40 cylinder units), then they are A: to D:, and the hard disks are
E:, F:, etc.
If you set the DIP switches for 2 drives (as I have done), then they're
assumed to be 360K units (in my case they are), and are A: and B:. Then
the hard disks are C:, D:, etc. Then you can load a device driver in
config.sys for the other two (external) drives, which then are given
letters _adter_ the hard disk partitions (in my case F:, G:). It's
amazing how many software installation programs refuse to accept that F:
and G: are floppy drives!
Even worse is demented software that refuses to believe that C: is NOT a
hard disk.
I installed MS-DOS 6.00 (when it first came out) on a machine with 4
floppies, 2 hard disks, a SCSI Floptical (also 1.4M) and a 2.8M parallel
port external floppy.
The install program for 6 refuses to install anywhere other than C:. But
that's a floppy on that machine, and not big enough for the full install.
MICROS~1 published a "fix" for those who wanted to install it on drives
other than C:. Their "fix":
Install it on C:,
Copy it from C: to the correct drive.
I eventually installed it on another, more conventional machine, copied
the files to floppies, and put it on my machine without their demented
INSTALL program.
The Assign command works wonders in cases like these. Unfortunately
MicroSoulth dropped it from their later versions of DOS. Still you can
probaly use a copy from an older DOS and use other DOS cammand (that I
can't think of the name of) to fake it into thinking that it's running
under it's native DOS version.
Joe