Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

>  
> > 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.

We tried a different floppy drive and did scandisk on two 1.44M floppy 
disks, then formatted, then ran make_fd.bat and then tried to boot and 
immediately got a string of gibberish characters.  We put back the first 
floppy drive.

Eventually I figured out that the fdimage program is somehow destroying 
floppy disks.  I put in known good scandisked disks and they come out fo 
the program with bad clusters.  The zimage file that is copied to them by 
make_fd.bat is always bad.  I cannot even copy it to the ramdisk made by 
booting, or to a ramdisk which I make for myself with vdisk, or to the 
hard drive (when I don't boot with that disk).  We have destroyed at least 
five floppy disks already.

Copying zimage to a floppy disk is not a problem.  The files on the disk 
are all okay except for zimage.  I can recombine part1 and part1 into the 
.gz file manually on hard drive and use that instead of the original .gz 
file to boot into ramdisk from the hard drive.  But I CANNOT get zimage to 
copy properly to a floppy disk using make_fd.bat, which uses fdimage, 
which appears to be writing a disk image containing only the files needed 
to boot - two hidden files, command.com, autoexec.bat, config.sys, 
vdisk.sys.  After fdimage operates, zimage does not copy properly and the 
disk is ruined.  Several bad clusters on each disk.  Jim thinks you should 
not be trying to copy a disk image that is smaller than the disk.

> 
> Sounds like an error reading the disk.  I often get this on my laptop (which
> is old and very fussy about floppies).

It will read anything from the floppy disks if you do not first run 
fdimage.  It will read anything after you run that except for zimage.  
This program is not working for us now on three computers, one with two 
floppy drives, or on a multitude of disks.

Jim is making his own setup in which the user first has to make a boot
disk, and his steup it will simply copy files to it and run the batch
files to split and combine and things.  No need to copy a disk image.  I
will post our resut if it works.  We are using MSDOS 6.22 not DR-DOS.  
You can first run Steven's program to create Part1 and Part2 on the hard
drive and if the two resulting floppy disks won't boot, then use our
method instead and copy those files to disk manually along with the rest
of the files which he will put into a zip file (vdisk autoexec config)
with instructions for use.  Or whatever he comes up with.  I said not to
make a large disk image since it would take a while to download and we
already have zimage and the baslinux.gz downloaded.


> If you get read errors on binary files, all sorts of things may well go 
> wrong.
> Try some other floppy disks. They are temperamental beasts.
> 
> Ian
> 

We tried lots of disks and three computers and four disk drives.  It is 
easier to rewrite the program than to find hardware that is sure to work 
with it.  Fdimage is either a very fussy program, or it does not work 
predictably with images smaller than the whole disk.

I will try to post something tomorrow or Sunday.  Any DOS ought to work
for making a boot disk.  The ramdisk will probably be Z.  It might be 8M 
instead of 4M - any votes?  It should be easy to modify it to make it 4M 
or 64M by editing autoexec.bat and we will include instructions for 
modifying it to suit your circumstances.

Steven may have used DOS 3.3 so that the Ramdisk would always be C> since 
3.3. won't recognize most hard drives nowadays because they are too large 
for it.  Does 3.3 recognize CD-ROM drives?