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Sindi Keesan wrote:
>
> This implies that everyone using your setup will need to 
> have floppy drives that are in alignment with yours!  

What it implies is that I made a mistake imaging only
the first 105kb of the floppy.  I should have done the
entire floppy.

> How would you fix the bad clusters on our disks?  We can't.  
> They seem to be physical damage.

What fdimage has done, it should be able to undo.  Just
get a floppy image file (eg. from the rootdsks directory
of a Slackware CDrom) and write it to the unusable floppy 
using fdimage.  Make sure you get an image that fills the
entire floppy (1474560).

> Am I correct that your program makes a 4M RAM disk if you 
> have 8M RAM and an additional 4M RAM disk (at /tmp) if you 
> have 12M or more?  

BL2 does that.  BL1 did not.  BL3 will probably do something
different.

> I might put something in a readme.txt file explaining 
> how to make a larger ramdisk by editing autoexec.bat 
> (is that the way to do it?) 

No, that won't work.  The maximum size of the ramdisk (4mb)
is fixed inside the kernel.  You can set a smaller ramdisk,
but not a larger one.

> This still means that you need a perfect 1.44MB floppy disk 
> and we are running out of those fast.  The older method lets 
> you use disks with a few bad sectors.  

Actually, the method used in BL 2.0 (formatting the floppy at
a higher density) also required a very high quality floppy.
The much earlier method (used in early BL1 floppies) was more
tolerant of bad floppies, but it required the user to format
his own floppies (which created a whole different set of
problems).

I've been around and around this floppy thing for years.  It
has been responsible for more version changes than any other
single item in BasicLinux.  I'm very sorry that my small image 
file has apparently caused you some problems (although I do 
note that some of the Slackware disk images also do not fill 
the entire floppy).  I will address that issue by providing a 
full-size image file.  Hopefully, that will be the last I hear 
about floppy problems.

> > I used to have endless problems when make_fd.bat relied 
> > upon people formatting their own floppies.
> 
> Problems of users not knowing how to do this?  

There were some problems with that, but the biggest problem
was people who used Windows machines to format the floppies.
In many cases this left insufficient spare room on the first
floppy for the necessary files.

> Put disk in drive, type sys a:, do dir/s  himem.sys, etc.  

Oh yes, we had a lot of issues with himem.sys and ramdrive.sys

> > And the purpose of 64mb is?
> 
> For people who want to add more programs?  

Why would people want to put more programs in a DOS ramdisk
that disappears the instant loadlin boots zimage?

> > I used it because it was the smallest DOS I had that would do
> > the job.
> 
> So that the .zip file for making floppy disks would be smaller?  

Yes.  Since make_fd.zip is part of bl2-00.zip, it makes that
smaller too.

> In order to use z: as the ramdisk Jim needed to add himem.sys 
> and some other program instead of vdisk, or else he would have 
> had to ask the user to determine what letter to use for the 
> ramdisk.  

More and more complications.  Been there, done that.

> He thought you used DOS 3.3 because it won't recognize large 
> hard drives and therefore the ramdisk is always C.

That was certainly a useful side-effect.

> does the presence of a CD-ROM drive affect the drive letter 
> of the RAM disk?  

I don't think so.  Don't CDrom drives need to be specifically
activated in config.sys/autoexec.bat ?  

Cheers,
Steven