I'm putting together a Pentium 233 to run some old programs I still
use. The computer will have two floppy drives. A is a 1.44 and B is a
1.2 meg. There are two hard drives. C and D are on one physical drive
and E is on the second drive. Win 98, a few programs and Dos 6.2 is on
C. This is the weird thing. I set this all up in bios and when I boot
from Dos both A and B are both accessible, however D and E come up as
"invalid drive specification". When I boot from windows the hard
drives are accessible but B is no where to be found. Bios does say
that everything is there, but depending on which operating system I
decide to use it isn't. Does anyone have a clue as to what could be
happening here? Thanks, Lenny

klem kedidelhopper wrote in news:6a53b993-
:

I'm putting together a Pentium 233 to run some old programs I still
use. The computer will have two floppy drives. A is a 1.44 and B is a
1.2 meg. There are two hard drives. C and D are on one physical drive
and E is on the second drive. Win 98, a few programs and Dos 6.2 is on
C. This is the weird thing. I set this all up in bios and when I boot
from Dos both A and B are both accessible, however D and E come up as
"invalid drive specification". When I boot from windows the hard
drives are accessible but B is no where to be found. Bios does say
that everything is there, but depending on which operating system I
decide to use it isn't. Does anyone have a clue as to what could be
happening here? Thanks, Lenny

Dos 6.22 and fat32 do not go together.
Extract dos 7 form the install floppy of win98SE,
and away you go, edit autoexec and config to get rid of
unwanted stuf.
I have used that for years at work.
On the net and on the install cd you can find dos utils
for wim98, including ansy.sys and such.
You might search at M$ site for a new FDISK.EXE, which
can format the current harddisks.
Yell here if you still miss pieces.

klem kedidelhopper wrote:
Pentium 233[...]Win 98[...]and Dos 6.2 is on C.
D and E come up as "invalid drive specification".

As usual, MICROS~1's crap sucks
compared to what else is available--for free.
http://google.com/search?q=FreeDOS+FAT32
....really sucks.
http://google.com/search?q=FreeDOS+USB-drivers

JeffM wrote:
klem kedidelhopper wrote:
Pentium 233[...]Win 98[...]and Dos 6.2 is on C.
D and E come up as "invalid drive specification".

As usual, MICROS~1's crap sucks
compared to what else is available--for free.
http://google.com/search?q=FreeDOS+FAT32
...really sucks.
http://google.com/search?q=FreeDOS+USB-drivers

BUT, it's not 100% compatible. Maybe 99.99999% but not 100%. I made the
mistake of using it for a laptop to run programs from "the big M"
if you know what I mean (not Microsoft) and occasionaly they crash,
where they don't with DOS.

I expect that if you don't know what I am talking about, it won't matter,
and FreeDos is a lot easier to use as it includes many utilities and features
that Microsoft DOS does not.

Drive letters BTW, are not C and D on the same drive if there is more than one
drive, it's C is the boot drive, D is the first partition on the second drive,
E is the second partition on the second drive and so on........

You may also want to use Windows 95 or 98 instead of DOS. They both include
FAT32 disk support and when they are running in Windows mode include support
for network cards and Windows 98 second edition inlcudes some USB support.

Both can be run in "DOS" mode where they boot the base operating system,
which is really DOS 7, and not the GUI.

You can get drivers for some network cards for DOS, but they eat up too
much memory to run the big M programs.

There is a program from the early days of DOS caled prn2file, which lets you
save print data in a file instead of printing it. So when I need a record
of what's been done, I run it to redirect the printout to a file, start my
DOS program, print the reports and then run the program with no parameters
to close out the file.

Then I reboot in Windows with the GUI, and connect to a networked printer.

On one laptop I have, I do the same thing with DOS in one partition (installed
first) and then Windows XP in the second partition. Windows boots and gives
me a choice of booting DOS or XP. I then have a wifi card in the PCMCIA slot,
and use XP SP3, as it has good wifi support. You can get drivers for some cards
(usually 802.1b) for Win98 but the connection utilities suck.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM
My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-(

Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

Seriously, am I missing something, or is this software running for the
sake of some old software that won't run on anything else?

I went so far as re-writing some very fussy VB Win16 software that
flatly refused to run on anything other than Win3.1 (this was in the
Win'98 era, and we didn't have any 3.1 boxes left).
Ironically, I wrote the "new" code in pascal (DOS based software),
which in all likelyhood pre-dated that VB compiler) AND I had to reverse
engineer the RS232 communications protocols (the hard way) even though
the original software came from the company I was working for anyway.
(obsolete product, and couldn't find the source backups).

*That's* how far I'd go before trying to bring old hardware back to life.
--
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.

On Nov 23, 6:24*am, John Tserkezis
wrote:
Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

* Seriously, am I missing something, or is this software running for the
sake of some old software that won't run on anything else?

* I went so far as re-writing some very fussy VB Win16 software that
flatly refused to run on anything other than Win3.1 (this was in the
Win'98 era, and we didn't have any 3.1 boxes left).
* Ironically, I wrote the "new" code in pascal (DOS based software),
which in all likelyhood pre-dated that VB compiler) AND I had to reverse
engineer the RS232 communications protocols (the hard way) even though
the original software came from the company I was working for anyway.
(obsolete product, and couldn't find the source backups).

* *That's* how far I'd go before trying to bring old hardware back to life.
--
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.

This incompatibility issue between one era and another really ****es
me off. Some of us just live a simple life and really only just need
the basics for certain things. But they've managed to engineer it so
that nothing old will work with anything new anymore. This is no
accident I'm convinced. What puzzles me though is that It seems like
I've done this before. I know that I've used 98 with 6.2 on the same
computer, (well different computers when one crapped out), for years.
Some of them were smaller hard drives like a few hundred meg or so.
Could that have changed anything? I may not have ever noticed this
discrepancy between what Bios is saying is there and what "My
Computer" actually shows. And this other issue. I can never get to my
D or my E drive in Dos. I really don't want to have to access my Dos
programs through Windows however if I'm running a Dos program would I
be able to see everything and get to them if I went to a Dos prompt
from 98? Thanks, Lenny

John Tserkezis wrote:
Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

If you removed everything else I wrote, why did you leave my name?


Seriously, am I missing something, or is this software running for the
sake of some old software that won't run on anything else?

I have no idea what the original poster wanted to do, but that's what I use it
for.

The software is for programing devices where the protocol is not published,
nor has ever been reverse engineered so writing a replacement is not possible.

The software will not run on a fast computer, nor will it run in a DOS box,
DOS emulator, etc.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM
My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-(

klem kedidelhopper wrote:

This incompatibility issue between one era and another really ****es
me off. Some of us just live a simple life and really only just need
the basics for certain things. But they've managed to engineer it so
that nothing old will work with anything new anymore. This is no
accident I'm convinced.

In all honesty, from my experience, this is not the case. To be fair,
it certainly *LOOKS* like engineered obsolescence, but as far as I can
see, it's short-sightedness, incompetency, bad choices, miss-management,
or a combination of the above.

In our case, it would be easy for me to blame Microsoft for the more
than crappy compiler (and boy, was it ever a POS) however, at least part
of the blame has to go towards the guy who chose and bought it in the
first place.

And sure, you could blame me too for using an ancient compiler that
used *hardware* calls to access the RS232 com ports. That said, I had
been using and testing it on windows 2000, which *properly* did not like
software going behind its back and talking to hardware directly. And it
STILL worked. My guess, was it was going to continue to work.
Actually, I have another piece of software that used the same RS232
hardware routines to talk to another device, and that one I use now.
Under win7, and it still works, so that other software would probably
work. If the hardware still existed of course...
So in my defence, at least I tested forward compatibility.

What puzzles me though is that It seems like
I've done this before. I know that I've used 98 with 6.2 on the same
computer, (well different computers when one crapped out), for years.
Some of them were smaller hard drives like a few hundred meg or so.
Could that have changed anything?

Don't think so. The FAT32 thing was mentioned in this thread, and it's
quite plausible.
It had support under 95 and 98, though with 95 you had to format the
drive from the start. 98 came with a utility that "converted" your
partition to FAT32. And it had to be specially selected for smaller
drives because by default it would not let you choose FAT32 if your
drive was smaller than a certain size.

I may not have ever noticed this
discrepancy between what Bios is saying is there and what "My
Computer" actually shows. And this other issue. I can never get to my
D or my E drive in Dos. I really don't want to have to access my Dos
programs through Windows however if I'm running a Dos program would I
be able to see everything and get to them if I went to a Dos prompt
from 98? Thanks, Lenny

I can agree with the other posters about the FAT32 thing. It's a very
plausible theory without actually checking. So it would be well worth
checking while booted in 98.
Run "FDISK /STATUS" from a dos prompt. Note, I had to get that from
google, as I've LONG since forgotten how to use fdisk.

I have no idea about the missing B: floppy under 98. Drive letter
assignments are not flexible on floppy drives, so it *should* see it
just fine (considering it works under dos).
--
Women get minks the same way minks get minks.

klem kedidelhopper wrote:
This incompatibility issue between one era and another
really ****es me off.

Get over it.
It's a fact of life if you choose to live in M$'s realm.

Some of us just live a simple life
and really only just need the basics for certain things.

Take a look at Linux e.g.
where M$ has gone thru multiple scripting memes over the years
(batch files, VisualBasic, PowerScript),
bash (Bourne Again SHell) has remained consistent since 1979.

But they've managed to engineer it
so that nothing old will work with anything new anymore.

You use the word "engineer" awfully loosely.
MSFT is run by salesmen.

This is no accident I'm convinced.

Duh. It's called "The MSFT business model".
How will Redmond make **more** money
if you don't buy their latest craptastic wares?

What puzzles me though is that
It seems like I've done this before.

Only if the disk was FAT16.

I know that I've used 98 with 6.2 on the same computer,

Lose95 has been mentioned.
I'll bet that was what was on that setup (FAT16).

[...]I went to a Dos prompt from 98?

*Don't* just shell out to an invocation of COMMAND.COM.
If you're going to run a DOS app, run it under *real* DOS:
**Start** in DOS (Don't allow WIN.COM to run).

On 11/23/2011 9:38 AM, John Tserkezis wrote:
In all honesty, from my experience, this is not the case. To be fair,
it certainly *LOOKS* like engineered obsolescence, but as far as I can
see, it's short-sightedness, incompetency, bad choices, miss-management,
or a combination of the above.


Yuppers, As that midget Napoleon said, "Never ascribe malice to that
which can be attributed to incompetency."

Jeff


--
"Everything from Crackers to Coffins"

On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 08:39:04 +0000 (UTC), "Geoffrey S. Mendelson"
wrote:

Drive letters BTW, are not C and D on the same drive if there is more than one
drive, it's C is the boot drive, D is the first partition on the second drive,
E is the second partition on the second drive and so on........

Not quite the case. After C: and D: as above, E: (F:, G: etc) will be
the partitions on the first HD and THEN follow the partitions on the
second HD.

On Nov 23, 7:57*pm, who where wrote:
On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 08:39:04 +0000 (UTC), "Geoffrey S. Mendelson"

wrote:
Drive letters BTW, are not C and D on the same drive if there is more than one
drive, it's C is the boot drive, D is the first partition on the second drive,
E is the second partition on the second drive and so on........

Not quite the case. *After C: and D: as above, E: (F:, G: etc) will be
the partitions on the first HD and THEN follow the partitions on the
second HD.

So at the risk of sounding like a dummy, is the FAT a function of the
particular hard drive or is it a function of the operating system? And
in my previous question, would a much smaller drive have a FAT 16
system that would be happy in the same bed as DOS 6.2? I need to run
6.2 as my programs run under that. I don't absolutely need to run
Windows on that computer. I have others, however it is handy at times
as some of my DOS documents occasionally are copied, pasted, and then
go out as emails.

If someone could please explain the FAT system with respect to Windows
and DOS I would be very grateful. Lenny

klem kedidelhopper wrote:

On Nov 23, 7:57 pm, who where ? wrote:
? On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 08:39:04 +0000 (UTC), "Geoffrey S. Mendelson"
?
? ? wrote:
? ?Drive letters BTW, are not C and D on the same drive if there is more than one
? ?drive, it's C is the boot drive, D is the first partition on the second drive,
? ?E is the second partition on the second drive and so on........
?
? Not quite the case. After C: and D: as above, E: (F:, G: etc) will be
? the partitions on the first HD and THEN follow the partitions on the
? second HD.

So at the risk of sounding like a dummy, is the FAT a function of the
particular hard drive or is it a function of the operating system? And
in my previous question, would a much smaller drive have a FAT 16
system that would be happy in the same bed as DOS 6.2? I need to run
6.2 as my programs run under that. I don't absolutely need to run
Windows on that computer. I have others, however it is handy at times
as some of my DOS documents occasionally are copied, pasted, and then
go out as emails.

If someone could please explain the FAT system with respect to Windows
and DOS I would be very grateful. Lenny


FAT is the 'File Allocation Table', and it tells the OS where files
are stored.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table


--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.

On 11/23/2011 12:07 AM, klem kedidelhopper wrote:
I'm putting together a Pentium 233 to run some old programs I still
use. The computer will have two floppy drives. A is a 1.44 and B is a
1.2 meg. There are two hard drives. C and D are on one physical drive
and E is on the second drive. Win 98, a few programs and Dos 6.2 is on
C. This is the weird thing. I set this all up in bios and when I boot
from Dos both A and B are both accessible, however D and E come up as
"invalid drive specification". When I boot from windows the hard
drives are accessible but B is no where to be found. Bios does say
that everything is there, but depending on which operating system I
decide to use it isn't. Does anyone have a clue as to what could be
happening here? Thanks, Lenny
You can bump up that computer to a 500Mhz pretty easy by getting
an AMD Athlon 500Mhz processor and setting the multiplier to 2.
With an AMD when the multiplier is set at 2 it is automatically
recognized as 6 by the processor. Set the clock speed at 83Mhz.
Multiply 83 X 6 = 498. Speed test software will usually show 501Mhz.

I just happen to have a new processor I can let you have for $15.00
American and $5.00 shipping in the U.S., if you're interested.

What kind of MB do you have?
Do you have the manual?
Some MB are configurable through the BIOS.

You can usually download a manual from the internet if you know
the exact type of MB.

Post a reply if you're interested and we'll work out communications.
--

On Nov 24, 5:54*am, klem kedidelhopper
wrote:
On Nov 23, 7:57*pm, who where wrote:

On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 08:39:04 +0000 (UTC), "Geoffrey S. Mendelson"

wrote:
Drive letters BTW, are not C and D on the same drive if there is more than one
drive, it's C is the boot drive, D is the first partition on the second drive,
E is the second partition on the second drive and so on........

Not quite the case. *After C: and D: as above, E: (F:, G: etc) will be
the partitions on the first HD and THEN follow the partitions on the
second HD.

So at the risk of sounding like a dummy, is the FAT a function of the
particular hard drive or is it a function of the operating system? And
in my previous question, would a much smaller drive have a FAT 16
system that would be happy in the same bed as DOS 6.2? I need to run
6.2 as my programs run under that. I don't absolutely need to run
Windows on that computer. I have others, however it is handy at times
as some of my DOS documents occasionally are copied, pasted, and then
go out as emails.

If someone could please explain the FAT system with respect to Windows
and DOS I would be very grateful. Lenny

As Michael Terrell said the FAT is how the OS finds files. The OS
defines which version of FAT it uses. FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS can all be
on the same physical drive in separate partitions. I used to run
multiple OSs and had similar problems and got around them by using
Partitionmagic and Bootmagic to set up 3 partitions on the hard disc.
The first 2 were both 2 GB FAT16 and the 3rd was the remainder of he
disc as FAT32. At boot time Bootmagic gave a choice of DOS 6.22 or
Win98SE. The 3nd FAT 16 partition was visible to both OSs and used as
a 'transfer' block where you could place files for exchange between
the OSs. For example a file in DOS to be emailed using Win98 was first
placed in the transfer zone and reboot into Win98 and do the email
operation. I still have an Athlon 3200 machine dual boot DOS6.22 or
Win XP Pro, also with the transfer partition. I had an Athlon XP
machine at my last job that had DOS 6.22 in a FAT16 partition, Win98SE
in a FAT32 partition and Win XP pro in an NTFS partition with a 4th
FAT16 transfer partition visible to all OSs. It used Bootmagic to
select OSs and defaulted to XP if you didn't make a selection

The newer machines with the Phenom II chips will 'sort of' run DOS.
The boards no longer support DOS upper memory blocks (DOS high UMB) so
it's limited to 640K - that's it.

Don't know if this helps but it may give some ideas.

Happy Thanksgiving

G²

"klem kedidelhopper" wrote in message
...

So at the risk of sounding like a dummy, is the FAT a function of
the particular hard drive or is it a function of the operating system?

Strictly speaking, neither. When the drive is formatted under a particular
operating system, the formatting is one the OS recognizes, such as FAT16 for
DOS, NTFS for NT-based systems, etc.

On Nov 24, 11:35*am, wrote:
On Nov 24, 5:54*am, klem kedidelhopper
wrote:





On Nov 23, 7:57*pm, who where wrote:

On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 08:39:04 +0000 (UTC), "Geoffrey S. Mendelson"

wrote:
Drive letters BTW, are not C and D on the same drive if there is more than one
drive, it's C is the boot drive, D is the first partition on the second drive,
E is the second partition on the second drive and so on........

Not quite the case. *After C: and D: as above, E: (F:, G: etc) will be
the partitions on the first HD and THEN follow the partitions on the
second HD.

So at the risk of sounding like a dummy, is the FAT a function of the
particular hard drive or is it a function of the operating system? And
in my previous question, would a much smaller drive have a FAT 16
system that would be happy in the same bed as DOS 6.2? I need to run
6.2 as my programs run under that. I don't absolutely need to run
Windows on that computer. I have others, however it is handy at times
as some of my DOS documents occasionally are copied, pasted, and then
go out as emails.

If someone could please explain the FAT system with respect to Windows
and DOS I would be very grateful. Lenny

As Michael Terrell said the FAT is how the OS finds files. The OS
defines which version of FAT it uses. FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS can all be
on the same physical drive in separate partitions. I used to run
multiple OSs and had similar problems and got around them by using
Partitionmagic and Bootmagic to set up 3 partitions on the hard disc.
The first 2 were both 2 GB FAT16 and the 3rd was the remainder of he
disc as FAT32. At boot time Bootmagic gave a choice of DOS 6.22 or
Win98SE. The 3nd FAT 16 partition was visible to both OSs and used as
a 'transfer' block where you could place files for exchange between
the OSs. For example a file in DOS to be emailed using Win98 was first
placed in the transfer zone and reboot into Win98 and do the email
operation. I still have an Athlon 3200 machine dual boot DOS6.22 or
Win XP Pro, also with the transfer partition. I had an Athlon XP
machine at my last job that had DOS 6.22 in a FAT16 partition, Win98SE
in a FAT32 partition and Win XP pro in an NTFS partition with a 4th
FAT16 transfer partition visible to all OSs. It used Bootmagic to
select OSs and defaulted to XP if you didn't make a selection

The newer machines with the Phenom II chips will 'sort of' run DOS.
The boards no longer support DOS upper memory blocks (DOS high UMB) so
it's limited to 640K - that's it.

Don't know if this helps but it may give some ideas.

Happy Thanksgiving

G²- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Well here's the thing, I know that I did not format this master. I
don't recall if I ever formatted this slave. I'll explain. I bought a
machine from a guy for a dollar to use for parts. The machine was
working but it was a much lesser machine than this one is as I recall.
It had a working copy of 98 on the hard drive so I figured that it was
just the thing I needed to run my DOS billing program, wordperfect,
(WP51 for DOS).

I set that drive up in this computer as a master and then set up
another drive that had my program and files on it that was failing, as
a slave and although I couln't save the progam (luckily) through DOS I
managed to copy all 1200 billing files onto the master. A friend sent
me another copy of Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS, I installed that onto the
master and then copied the 1200 files onto it. This restored my
program. So after this I removed the flaky slave and installed another
physical drive of questionable origin and then through 98 copied the
entire WP folder from C to E. So now I have a backup copy on another
physical drive. I thought that this would be a prudent.endeavor. Now
that I'm out of the woods for the time being, I'll work on building
another computer with two formatted drives, and duplicate what I have
on this one now. Since I built this one I have also obtained a 98 SE
CD. So now I can start that new system from scratch. I know that all
this may seem silly for a DOS program however I'm used to the program,
and I like it so I really don't want to switch. Besides I like working
in DOS. I feel like I'm actually speaking to the machine as opposed
to answering "OK" or "yes" or "no" in Windows. Thanks to everyone who
is helping me. I reallly appreciate it. Have a happy Thanksgiving to
all who celebrate it, and watch out for the "turkeys". Lenny.

klem kedidelhopper wrote:
is the FAT a function of the particular hard drive

Yes.
....and as others have explained,
the File Allocation Table is a table of contents for a drive.

or is it a function of the operating system?

Yes (no "or" needed).
The OS being used has to support the filesystem
in order to use it, obviously.

There's also a FAT12, commonly used on floppies.
There's also the "VFAT" extension to FAT,
which is what allows long filenames;
that has to have OS support too, obviously.

Linux, as a prime example, supports DOZENS of filesystems.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.co...mb+ufs+ntfs#47
http://tinyurl.com/DozensOfSupportedFilesystems
http://www2.math.uni-wuppertal.de/~b...ebssysteme.pdf
(Page 47)

Linux has supported MICROS~1's crappy filesystems
for years and years now.
(The last kink was getting reliable NTFS writes going;
that utility went gold in 2007.)
http://google.com/search?q=NTFS-3G+2007

M$'s crappy filesystems (which don't use proper permissions)
http://google.com/search?q=r-w-x-r-w...er+permissions
are one of the big reasons that M$'s junk gets pwned so easily.