MS DOS booted from Hard drive does not execute any .exe file even from outside

[logamuthu]

I am a 68-years old Neurosurgeon - a die-hard-fan-and-avid-user(for over three decades) of MS DOS 6.22 with QBasic1.0, Foxpro for DOS 2.5 a and Wordstar 4.0 for all my work - taking at the end of every day a zipped back up of all transaction files of the day into a

single 1.44 MB FDD and back them upto my other PCs via FDD / USB Pen drive / Network etc., I use Windows only for surfing - telemedicine etc.,

Recently my 10 year old mobo started acting funny - weird messages about FDD, Keyboard not present etc., After sending the old mobo to service, I shifted the MS DOS ec., Hard disk to another mobo - removing a pre-existing XP Hard disk leaving the old MS DOS as the only HDD.

MS DOS booted fine from the old HDD and did all internal commands like dir, type, copy etc but hung up on all .exe files - scandisk,

qbasic, fox, foxpro, ws etc.,

I then booted from a DOS Boot Floppy and now all .exe files worked fine, except the inevitable time-lag of the processor looking up

command.com in the slower FDD each time I gave a command fom the command line or via MS DOS Batch files.

I then used sys.com in the FDD to transfer the system to the C:\ drive. Now command.com in the FDD and the C:\ on the HDD had the same size

and date stamp. Yet when I rebooted fom the hard drive - cold and hot, the .exe files did not work and the system hung!

Can anybody help Plsss!

Googol Thanx in advance!!

[strollin]

What version of MS DOS was on the HDD and what version of DOS was on the floppy? If command.com had a different file size, must be a different version of DOS.

[logamuthu]

Thank you strollin.

FDD and HDD have the same version namely MS DOS 6.22 and the command.com has the same

file size and date stamp in both of them! I even transferred the system from the FDD to the C:\

drive of the HDD. Yet booting from HDD loads DOS and gets me to the C:\Prompt from where I

cannot run ANY .exe file - scandisk, qbasic,foxpro etc., while booted from the FDD I have no such

problem except that the execution of commands is very slow given the lower speed of FDD as

against HDD and I am unable to copy my files in the HDD - even the simple ones to the FDD

which is the booter. How long and how far to depend on the unreliable FDD and its media?!

Plss help!

[EzyStvy]

Yet booting from HDD loads DOS and gets me to the C:\Prompt from where I cannot run ANY .exe file - scandisk, qbasic,foxpro etc., while booted from the FDD I have no such

Are the exe files in the root of C? Or are they in a different directory that you need to change too in order to run them?

[glc]

Have you considered installing DOSBOX on the XP machine and running your stuff that way?

[logamuthu]

Googol Thanx EzyStvy!

The exe files are in the root of C as well as different directories with a path statement in autoexec.bat pointing to their location.

Anyway the Floppy boot runs all exe files and I have transferred the system - command.com, io.sys and msdos.sys to the hard disk also - the file sizes and date stamp in the hard disk and boot FDD are the same. Yet exe files do not work with a hdd boot!

Googol Thanx glc!

I do use DOS BOX and many other DOS emulators in my XP machines but I would like to keep my fossilised companion - DOS machine - which has worked with me for over thirty years - going too! After all OLD IS GOLD! I feel I am in full control while on the DOS machine! Don' we feel dummified when using GUI - Windows etc.,

Plss help me find a solution.

[glc]

I'm pulling at straws, but what are the basic specs of the XP machine compared to the sick one? (Processor type/speed, amount of ram, etc.) I'm thinking possible issues with DOS on new hardware problems.

Are you in the US? If not, what country are you in?

[logamuthu]

Thanx glc!

Answer to ur 2nd quest first: I am in Chennai, India.

The "sick" Dos machine is HP Brio BA 600 with the following features:
Form Factor Micro Tower
Processor Intel Pentium III 600 MHz
Installed Memory 128 MB (SDRAM)
Operating System MS DOS 6.22
HDD Size 40 GB
Processor
Processor Type Intel Pentium III
Processor Speed 600 MHz
Processor Manufacturer Intel
Processor Upgradability Upgradable
Max Processors Qty. 1
Motherboard
Bus Speed 100 MHz
Video Output Interface AGP 2x
Memory
RAM Technology SDRAM
Installed RAM 64 MB
Max Supported RAM 512 MB
Installed Video Memory 8 MB
Hard Drive
Hard Drive Capacity 40 GB
Hard Drive Interface DMA/ATA-33 (Ultra)
CD / DVD
Optical Drive Type CD-ROM NOT SUPPORTED BY MS DOS!
Optical Drive Read Speed 48x (CD) NOT SUPPORTED BY MS DOS!
Other Drives
Floppy Drive 3.5" 1.44 MB floppy

My Windows machines include two assembled P4 Desktops and an IBM Thinkpad R51 all running Windows XP SP2 and a Dell Alienware Aurora ALX Desktop running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit.

[glc]

Hmm - that's not going to be cost-effective to fix the Brio, it's mostly proprietary parts. I was thinking I had an old motherboard around here that would work, but that's not the case.

You should be able to find another old used machine that runs for next to nothing - especially if it has a dead hard drive.

Interesting - does it have 128mb ram but DOS is only seeing 64mb? I assume you are only using 2.1gb of the 40gb hard drive.

[logamuthu]

Hi glc!

Yes U r rt. I could work MS DOS only from an 8 GB partition of my 40 GB HDD - the remaining 32 GB of the HDD are an idle waste! Can't help! Gone are the days when I used to work with an 150 MB HDD, nay even with systems with no FDD and no HDD - late 1960s!!!

[glc]

How did you even get DOS to use 8gb? I thought the maximum size of a FAT16 partition was 2.1?

I'm with you there - my last DOS/Win 3.11 machine had a 540mb hard drive and at the time that was HUGE.

[strollin]

I confess that I'm at a loss as to why booting from the HDD is a problem. As a temporary solution to speed things up when you boot from the floppy, put the line "shell=c:\dos\command.com c:\dos\ /e:1024" in the config.sys file on your boot floppy. Note: If command.com is in a different directory on your HDD, modify the line to point to the correct directory. This tells DOS to use command.com from the HDD instead of going back to the floppy to load it..

I would actually modify the autoexec.bat file on the floppy to switch execution to the HDD as soon as possible with something like this:

REM Autoexec.bat on floppy
C:
boot.bat

REM boot.bat in root of C: drive
Path=.;C:\;C:\DOS;... (Whatever you need in your path)
REM The rest of the lines from your HDDs autoexec.bat

Doing so will speed up the boot process since only the system files need to be loaded from the floppy.

I've used this technique on older DOS machines that don't support booting from a HDD.

If you use the shell environment variable when booting the machine, once booted you can remove the floppy disk as it won't be needed any longer.

As a long term solution. I would perform a backup of the HDD (excluding the system files and DOS directory) then format the drive and re-install DOS then restore the backup.

If you want to speed up your DOS machine, create a RAM disk in your extended memory (memory above 1M). Then copy command.com to the RAM disk and point the shell environment variable to command.com on the RAM disk. When DOS needs to reload command.com it will load much faster from the RAM disk.

[strollin]

Originally Posted by glc How did you even get DOS to use 8gb? I thought the maximum size of a FAT16 partition was 2.1? I'm with you there - my last DOS/Win 3.11 machine had a 540mb hard drive and at the time that was HUGE.

DOS can use 8G put it needs to be partitioned in 2G chunks. Partitions of this size require 64K cluster sizes which I always hated because 1 cluster is the smallest unit DOS can allocate. This means that a file 1 byte in size will actually require 64K bytes of disk space! The leftover, unusable space is commonly referred to as "slack space".

[glc]

No, a 2gb FAT16 partition will use 32k clusters. However, there's a "special" FAT16 that was supported with WinNT 4.0 that was capable of making a 4gb partition that used 64k clusters.

[edfair]

Do the internal commands work? Dir, type, etc.

Can you run fdisk off the floppy? Looking for info about the partition, particularly if the 8gb is segmented into 2 primary and 6 extended. 2.1 was the largest and any extra needed to be in an extended partition and logical drives carved out.

[logamuthu]

Googol Thanx Strollin, glc and edfair,

I shall try your suggestions and revert to you.

[logamuthu]

Googol thanx Strollin!

I read your last reply deeply.

Gems indeed!

But I dunno how to create a RAM disk. Can you guide me plss?

Also, as of now, my system boots from the HDD alright as also from the FDD. Only HDD booted c:\ prompt does not execute >exe commands - internal and external despite being given the path of the .exe files in the autoexec.bat and even from the command line while the FDD booted c:\ prompt executes all .exe files without any problems albeit slower due to the inevitable FDD lookup for each command. How long can I depend on the highly unreliable FDD to run my system?

This being the case, should I necessarily backup my HDD (except command.com and system files) ,format my HDD, transfer system to it via sys.com in the FDD and then copy into it non-syatem filess from the backup HDD. Sounds logical but a weebit tedious and frightening that I may lose all my applications like QBasic, Foxpro for DOS 2.5a and WS4 and may have to re-load them from my FDD backups since the DOS machine does not consistently support CD ROM and never supports USB although I have done it sometime ago for a few days with a Linux - MSDOS dual boot!

I am taking the previlege of sending this PM to you and requesting you to be added to my Friends / Contacts lists just to speed up communicstions between the two of us and resolve my problem faster. Hope it is OK by you!

[glc]

Could you please post your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files?

[edfair]

If you have done a "sys c:" from the correctly working floppy and the hard drive still doesn't execute I would suspect a corrupted command.com, possibly from a hard drive issue. From the floppy you could "rename c:\command.com command.org" then do a "copy command.com c:\ /v" and put a working copy to a new place on the hard drive. As GLC says, "grasping at straws".

[strollin]

Assuming you have a complete MS-DOS 6.22 install with a folder named DOS on your C: drive you would need to add the line

DEVICE=C:\DOS\RAMDRIVE.SYS 1000 512 128 /E

to your config.sys file. This will create a 1MB Ramdisk in extended memory. If you want a larger disk increase the 1000 to 2000 to create a 2MB disk. Depending on your CDROM drive the Ramdisk may be D: or E:. You can treat it just like any other drive but when you turn the power off, everything on the drive will be lost so don't save important files there.

Yes, backing up everything to floppies is very tedious. That's just one of the many reasons the rest of the world has moved past DOS. How much of your disk is full? Most of us went from floppy backups to tape backups when hard drives got larger than about 30MB or so.

I don't understand your statement about DOS not consistently supporting CDROM. In my experience, if you load the correct driver the CDROM support is rock solid.

As far as the floppy being unreliable, it's pretty easy too make a copy of a floppy disk so you can always have a replacement disk to fall back on.

Could you post the config.sys and autoexec.bat files from both the floppy you boot from that works and your C: drive? I wonder if there's something different going on between them.

[glc]

I'm concerned about memory management - I want to see if you have himem.sys and emm386.exe properly configured.

[logamuthu]

Hi strollin!
Hi glc!

As required by you, I am giving autoexec.bat and config.sys files in my bootFDD and in C:\ drive of my HDD below serially:

Autoexec.bat in FDD:

PROMPT $p$g
PATH C:\foxpro;c:\;C:\DOS
LH /L:1,6384 doskey
doskey
pmu.com

Config.sys in FDD:

DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS
BUFFERS=40,0
FILES=40

Autoexec.bat in C:\ of HDD

PROMPT $p$g
PATH C:\foxpro;c:\;C:\DOS
pmu.com
doskey

config.sys in C:\ of HDD:

DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS
BUFFERS=40,0
FILES=40

Help solve my problem Plsss,,,

[glc]

Those are pretty simple - but I think I'd change both autoexec's to this:

PROMPT $p$g
PATH C:\;C:\DOS;C:\foxpro
LH doskey
pmu.com

What is "pmu.com"?

[strollin]

I only see a couple of differences between the FDD version and the HDD version. It seems that you are loading doskey into high memory on the FDD (it also appears as if you are loading a second copy into the DOS memory space). There's also a different load order for doskey and pmu.com.

I would save a copy of the HDD autoexec.bat then I would change it to look like this:

PROMPT $p$g
PATH C:\foxpro;c:\;C:\DOS
LH /L:1,6384 doskey
pmu.com

I can't see that it will fix the problem but it's worth a try. You might also want to preface the pmu.com entry with it's correct path so DOS doesn't need to search the PATH to locate that file.

[logamuthu]

Thanx Strollin!

I modified the autoexec.bat in HDD and FDD - didn't solve the issue.

I formatted the hard drive holding MS DOS and reloaded MS DOS and other jobs - it was almost like labor pains but I grinned and bore it. Voila! the baby was born! this time MS DOS booted from the hard disk (FDD disconnected) and executed all .exe files. I pinched myself and, (just to verify whether my joy will last and I shall live happily everafter with my system) warm-rebooted the system from HDD - lo behold, back to sqare one : cold-rebooted the system from HDD - lo behold, back to sqare one ! I don't believe in ghosts but the system seems to be jinxed - HDD boot was perfect only once and went back to square one on later reboots from HDD - warm and cold.

The Mobo is Intel Desktop Board D915 GAV with Intel Pentium P4 processor. May be Intel can tell me whether this is an instance of BIOS / Processor / mobo Intel Desktop Board D915 GAV with Intel Pentium P4 processor does not fully / repeatably / reliably / predictably support HDD boot of MS DOS.

Still struggling with FDD boots; maybe I shall try Ramdrive also - but I am worried it may spoil my presently-working FDD boot too!

[logamuthu]

Thanx glc!

pmu.com is Power Management Utility from good old MS DOS days - I don't remember the source - similar to the now-prevalent Monitor Power off after a pre-set delay!

[glc]

I'd rem that out. It may be causing issues.

How much ram is in that GAV board? You may want to pull some.

[logamuthu]

Hi Strollin,
Intel Live chat told me " I apologize but this motherboard has reached its End of Interactive Support and in the other hand MS-DOS is not longer supported ".

QUE VE LA?!

[logamuthu]

Hi glc

The Intel Desktop Board D915 GAV with Intel Pentium P4 processor has 512 MB RAM.

[logamuthu]

Hi glc,
Your statement "You may want to pull some." - Should I add RAM or reduce it?