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[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

Working on the Cyrix computer with Divide overflow problemw hen I try to 
boot to ramdisk with 2 floppies.

Scandisk - 100% good
Make_fd:

Disk1

 Volume in drive A is PCD330BD   
 Directory of A:\

COMMAND  COM        25,307 03-17-87  12:00p
VDISK    SYS         8,227 06-03-03   4:11p
CONFIG   SYS            26 06-03-03   4:26p
AUTOEXEC BAT           352 06-03-03   4:11p
CONTINUE BAT           248 06-03-03   4:11p
LOADLIN  EXE        32,225 09-02-02   2:10p
ZIMAGE             512,425 01-24-03   6:51a
PART1              399,936 01-29-04   8:23a
Plus two hidden files ibmbio.com 22k and ibmdos.com 30K

Disk2

 Volume in drive A has no label
 Volume Serial Number is 2F26-0FE9
 Directory of A:\

PART2            1,237,762 01-29-04   8:23a

Boot from these disks - Divide overflow
A couple of times I got 'Data error reading drive A:' instead.


--------
Change autoexec.bat to autoexec.bak and do each step at a a time.

Usually it all goes well until I put in disk 2 and hit space bar and get 
Divide overflow.    

One time while copying zimage from a: to c> (ramdisk) I got a string
of gibberish with hearts and happy faces and the computer froze up and had 
to be powered off and on again.  This also happened one time on the Intel 
computer, which otherwise gets divide overflow problems.

It appears that zimage is not being copied correctly to drive C> (ramdisk) 
from drive A: (floppy disk).  Sometimes it freezes up, sometimes it is 
just copied but cannot be loaded with loadlin and gives divide overflow.

On the third computer it does not seem to be copying part2 but I have not 
checked that out without the autoexec.bat yet.  Part 2 is supposed to copy 
from A: to ramdisk.    It just freezes up instead - no lights or noises 
from the floppy drive after the first brief lightup.

My partner will look at this when he figures out why the C++ program 
written to work with Windows wants him to change something about newline 
to compile with DOS DJGPP.  (And the file names need to be shorter).

He may try using a later version of MSDOS to make the RAMDISK rather than 
version 3 as used in this program, in case that is the problem.

The floppy disks appear to be correctly made, they just won't run because 
zimage won't copy properly to the ramdisk.


This computer has EDO RAM - 4x8M SIMMs.  The Intel has 4x16M FP SIMMs.
The AMD has 2 DIMMs.  I doubt that they all have bad RAM.  

The floppy disks from the older version work on this computer (where one 
disk was reformatted to hold the entire large file baslinux.gz).


No viruses (just ran a recent download of f-prot).

4DOS also had some trouble accessing the ramdrive.  It froze up but could 
reboot Ctl-Alt-Del.  I had to power off when I got the gibberish while 
copying zimage from a: to c>

More in a while.  I wanted to get this communicated before my misbehaving 
memory lost it.