CCECHAN%NUSVM.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu ( Luther Chan) (07/27/90)
Help, I have discover a bug in Turbo Pascal 5.0 and 5.5 that running on DOS 3.3. This bug has been confirm by many people in a lab here, because they use turbo pascal to teach PASCAL language. The machine used was PHILIPS P3204(IBM PC-AT compatible) running MS-DOS 3.3 with two diskette drives, one disk drive High density 1.2M, one 360K, no harddisk. The same problem happened if the disk drives are both 1.2 M or both 1.44M, or one 1.2M and one 1.44M. The problem: It can be simulated easily, the bootable diskette contain all the turbo pascal files. Data disk on B drive low density 360K or 720K, if data disk were 1.2M or 1.44M there will no error. If you have a harddisk disable it. 1) type turbo on A. 2) In turbo integrated environment, goto OS shell. 3) dir b: (this b:drive can have program or data,it has to be 360K or 720K) or just change drive to b: 4) exit (return to your turbo environment.) 5) now try to change drive with the menu or dir. --->>> You should get: Critical error on Drive a: Retry or Abort? <<<<---- (note: the message may be not exactly as worded). I have tried it on other machine that use 286 or AT compatible with the same setup the problem will exist. It will not happen if you have a harddisk or both diskettes with 1.2M or 1.44M or one 1.2M one 1.44M. The problem seems to be on the turbo pascal shell. If you have a solution please send to me: ccechan@nusvm.bitnet. One solution we have was to open drive A and reinsert the diskette, but was unacceptable to many students, lecturers and myself. Mr Chan Yin Wah Systems Programmer Computer Centre, National University of Singapore