16 Jun
2013
16 Jun
'13
11:46 a.m.
On Sun, 16 Jun 2013, Pete Turnbull wrote:
I have a PC used (or at least intended) for floppy
transfers, which has
a hard drive booting MS-DOS 6.22, with an 80-track 5.25" drive and a
3.5" drive connected to a WDAT-240 controller. It has the MS-DOS
network stuff installed so I can connect to a shared network drive. It's
also got a CDROM drive on its second IDE bus, and the corresponding
lines for the driver and MSCDEX are in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. Most
of the drivers etc are loaded in high memory (I ran MEMMAKER in the dim
and distant past).
At the moment, those two lines are commented out because if they're not,
the floppies don't work properly. Has anyone got any idea why? The
CDROM works fine if I uncomment those lines (but the floppies don't) and
network shares work fine either way.
It sounds like memmaker added parameters that are loading the cdrom driver
into a memory region that conflicts with the floppy drive controller. That
wasn't an uncommon problem for third party I/O boards and controllers that
have their own BIOS and memory. Have you tried a third party memory
manager instead of memmaker such as 386MAX or QEMM? QEMM could usually
handle these cases if you allowed it to do the really intensive optimize
routine where it probes pretty much every single memory region. Most of
the time QEMM will cause the machine to lock up several times during the
process, but it is designed to resume after a hard reset and exclude the
memory region that caused the problem.