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Nomdo Jansonius wrote:
>
>    >What software are you using to download it?
> 
> Arachne 1.70 rev 3 

That's a little unusual.  But I would be surprised if
that were the cause (unless there is a weird interaction
with one of your other unusual features).

>    >What is the exact command you use to mount it?
> 
> By editing /etc/fstab, the drive is permanently mounted 
> in /dos. 
>
>   /dev/hda6       /dos     msdos       defaults   1   0

I suggest you temporarily put a # at the beginning of that 
line (and mount that drive manually) until we sort out this 
problem.

> I have two HD's: HD1 has a primary DOS partition (c:), 

Normally that would be /dev/hda1; however, I believe that
DrDOS actually puts C: at /dev/hda4

> an extended DOS partition with three drives (e: f: g:), 

Apparently branching from /dev/hda2

> a linux native (hda3), and a linux swap (hda4). My DOS drive 
> "temp" that is used to communicate with BL is hda6 (f:). 

So,   E: = hda5     F: = hda6      G: = hda7

> HD2  has one DOS partition (d:), a linux native (hdb1), 
> and a linux swap (hdb2). BL1 is on hda3/4, BL2 is on hdb1/2.

So, putting it all together:
---------------------------------
/dev/hda1               C: ???
/dev/hda2               extended?
/dev/hda3   BL1 root
/dev/hda4   swap 
/dev/hda5               E:
/dev/hda6   /dos        F:
/dev/hda7               G:

/dev/hdb1   BL2 root
/dev/hdb2   swap    
/dev/hdb3?              D:
--------------------------------- 

First comment:  you don't need both swap partitions.  I suggest
you use /dev/hdb2 for both (and free up /dev/hda4).  

Second comment:  I am very worried about your first HD (hda).
There are two potential problems (which could be very serious
in combination).  First, your use of extended partitions is 
a risk.  On a pure Linux system, extended partitions seem to 
work fine; however, on a hybrid Linux/DOS system, it is safer 
to use only primary partitions (four per HD). The second issue 
is DrDOS.

A year or two ago, I tried using DrDOS with BasicLinux.  I was
experimenting with creating the smallest possible DOS partition
for booting Linux, so I used DrDOS 5.  I was astonished to find
that, when I partitioned/formatted the drive with DrDOS, it put
the C: partition at /dev/hda4.  I had some problems with this
when I installed Linux on that drive, so I switched to DrDOS 6
(which is larger than DrDOS 5, but still smaller than MSDOS 5).
Unfortunately, DrDOS 6 also puts C: at /dev/hda4.  And so does
DrDOS 7.

To summarize:  For a rock-solid system where partitions can be 
confidently shared between BasicLinux and DOS, use only primary 
partitions (four per HD) and do not use DrDOS.

I know there are several DrDOS users running BasicLinux and most 
of them probably don't experience serious problems.  Perhaps just 
the occasional glitch.  However, I am used to a rock-solid system 
and those little glitches give me the creeps.

In your case, the glitches are serious (particularly the one that 
deleted your COMMAND.COM).  If you did in fact partition hda with 
DrDOS and it did put C: on /dev/hda4, then you do have a problem.  
This is probably made worse by the extended partitions.

> Probably already during boot: in BL I only did three steps: 
> 
> 1) login as root
> 2) cd /dos
> 3) dir
> 
> Then the file has already been reduced to 0 bytes.

I suspect that the problem occurs when the DOS partition is 
mounted (which you are doing automatically in fstab).  I suggest 
you put a # at the beginning of that line so mounting is not 
automatic.  By doing the mount manually, you can determine 
whether it is the cause; moreover, the manual mount might give 
you an error message which you do not see when fstab mounts it.

It may also be possible in a manual mount to use a parameter
that eliminates your problem.

> the problem seems very persistent with abiword, but has 
> definitely happened before with other .tgz files. 
> Finally, I tried gzip abiword.tgz -d in DOS yielding a 
> 15 Mb abiword.tar which was also reduced to 0 bytes by BL!.

It appears that something is fundamentally wrong here: some 
inconsistency between how DrDOS sees that partition and how 
Linux sees it.  Files are getting lost in the confusion.

Cheers,
Steven