[net.micro.pc] More DOS 3.1 / IBM PC bugs

jwg@duke.UUCP (Jeffrey William Gillette) (12/17/85)

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I received a document today in which some of you may have some interest.  
I am passing it along unedited.  It appears to come from a VM/CMS source
called 'pcshare'.  Any comments?
___________________________________________________________________

More problems with DOS 3.1:

1)  The DOS 3.1 RESTORE cannot correctly restore a file with
    the read only attribute if the file spans two diskettes.
    The portion of the file on the second diskette is lost
    during the restore.

2)  The following came from a local bulletin board:

    IBM Dealer's Hotline Problem # DLE-850009
    -----------------------------------------
 
    This problem occurs when using DOS 3.1 on a non-AT (ie AT
    intelligent controller) with a hard disk.  It is
    relatively rare, but if conditions are right, let's hope
    that you just backed up your hard disk.  If you haven't,
    you'll wish that you had!

    Whenever a disk drive that is not on an AT disk
    controller card has an error that goes through ECC (Error
    Correction Code) under DOS 3.1, the data on that disk is
    garbled on all subsequent sectors.  This problem occurs
    on all non-AT systems, including IBM's XT (with the IBM
    disk controller).
 
    One example (I am told) of this type of error is a DMA
    boundry error.  Apparently, these errors are not too
    common, but certain code is able to force this error 100%
    of the time and thus demonstrate the problem.  To keep it
    from being misused by the less responsible among us, that
    code should not be published.

ASK-INFO responses to questions about these problems were:

1)  Turn off the read only attribute before backing up.

2)  There are no official fixes available for DOS 3.1

Nico Mak

Date:  Monday, 4 November 1985  12:23:49  EST

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