16 Jun
2013
16 Jun
'13
1:54 p.m.
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.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
16 Jun
16 Jun
2:46 p.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.
6:46 p.m.
On 16/06/2013 19:46, Tothwolf wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jun 2013, Pete Turnbull wrote:
No, because I don't have either. I'll go and ask Google where they are
tomorrow. A WDAT-240 doesn't have any memory, AFAIR, though. And it's
set to the standard floppy address (the motherboard controller is
disabled because it doesn't work very well).
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
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? 
3:11 p.m.
On Sun, 16 Jun 2013, Pete Turnbull wrote:
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.
Was it working before? What changed?
My first inclination would be to make a new CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT
(save the old ones) WITHOUT any upper memory usage, and, of course, with
LASTDRIV set to Z:
Next step, I'd check to see if I still had BIOS access to the drives when
they "aren't working" with DOS.
6:43 p.m.
On 16/06/2013 20:11, Fred Cisin wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jun 2013, Pete Turnbull wrote:
Good question, dunno (don't remember). I haven't used this machine for
a long time but I think they were.
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.
Was it working before? What changed? My first inclination would be to make a new CONFIG.SYS
and AUTOEXEC.BAT
(save the old ones) WITHOUT any upper memory usage, and, of course, with
LASTDRIV set to Z:
Good idea. I eventually thought of that but ran out of time, I'll try
tomorrow.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
8:56 p.m.
I have a PC used (or at least intended) for floppy
transfers, which has
May I use your message to jump on another subject?
What is the most recommended computer/floppy controller (no, no
catweasel, sorry) to do floppy transfers?
I keep a G3 (the most advanced mac with internal floppy drive) for mac
disk creation, but I'd like to build a machine to transfer disks to my other
old computers (MSX, TRS-80, CoCo, TI-99/4A, et al)
Thanks
Alexandre, PU1BZZ
4087
days inactive
4088
days old
5 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
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alexandre.tabajara＠gmail.com -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
pete＠dunnington.plus.com -
tothwolf＠concentric.net