27 Feb
2002
27 Feb
'02
10:59 a.m.
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.