Re: off topic: enhanced DOS ?

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

"M.W. Poirier" wrote:

>  I'm in the market for a new system which would have a 80G hard
>  drive. I'd like to run Windows 97, second edition, on it, and
>  DOS 2000, which I understand is the latest version. My goal
>  is to place DOS 2000 in one partition and Windows 98 in another.
>  Does what you say below also apply to the above operating systems?

Absolutely -- the basic principles remain constants. For example, you can only
have 4 primary partitions per hard drive, one of which must be given over to the
"Extended" partition that serves as a container for all of your Logical
partitions. To the best of my knowledge, all MicroSoft operating systems up until
the advent of NT *required* that they be installed on a Primary partition C:. (You
can have two C drives, provided they are both Primaries, and only one of them is
active at a time, the non-active one being temporarily hidden or invisible.) The
later 32-bit operating systems (OS/2 from version 3 on, NT and its MS successors)
allowed you to install them on a Logical drive partition, such as J:, where I have
the main W2K partition. However, you might still encounter some complications or
limitations, depending on the drive geometry and other factors, mostly having to do
with cylinder boundaries, and how far out you happen to be from the beginning of
the drive. On some hard drives, earlier versions of OS/2 could not be installed
unless it fell inside the 4G, or in some cases the 8G boundary. The current
release of EcomStation (successor to OS/2) has greatly improved on that, but I
believe there is still a distance limit. In order to have the W2K partitions be
bootable that far out, I had to put specific boot loader code at the beginning of
the first C: (FAT-16) Primary.

[I think that Unix / Linux is a whole 'nother ballgame, with some different rules,
and, not knowing what I'm talking about there, I'll keep my trap shut.]

Anyway, in regard to DOS, you'll need to follow this sort of a plan. Have at least
one C: that is FAT-16 and given over to DOS. (If you have two C drives -- say, the
second one belonging to W98 -- or any other multi-OS arrangement, you will need
some utility like System Commander to mediate your boot-up options. NT and W2K
*came with* a very bare bones utility that could do this. I don't know about
earlier or later Win versions.) It is best to have your DOS app.s not too far away
from the DOS partition. And anything that DOS, or DOS app.s and utilities must be
able to see needs to exist in FAT-16 space that falls inside the 8G boundary.
DOS-based programs like Partition Magic or Drive Image may be able to see the whole
drive, regardless, but may be constrained in their operations, unless you have the
latest versions. I get all of my DOS stuff out of the way early, and leave later
drive space to the 32-bit OSes. But still, if there is some tricked-up version of
DOS out there I don't know about, which can see and access much larger chunks of
drive real estate, I would certainly be interested.

It is a good idea to map out on paper the desired layout for your new, larger hard
drive, before you actually roll up your sleeves and get to work on it.

Jordan