terence@ttidca.TTI.COM (Terence Davis) (03/10/90)
After receiving ~10 responses on my request for info about creating DOS partitions > 32MB I decided on SpeedStor by Storage Dimensions (I think thats the company). It had the benefit of being mentioned 4 times and was also the cheapest, $39 mail order. I looked for DR DOS, but my two local Egghead stores said, "Gee, the only thing I know of to do that is DOS 4.xx!". This when they had, IN STOCK, DR DOS/386 which does what I wanted but requires a 80386 which I don't have. . .yet. Well, SpeedStor arrived and I immediatly went to install it. After doing a full backup of c: and d:, I ran their install batch file. First problem: Nothing happens for ~90 seconds. Was it working or had it frozen?!? I let it sit for a while and then the harddisk begins to spin occasionally. First real indications of life appear: ERROR: Unable to correctly identify drive type(s) is displayed at the bottom of the screen. Then some more waiting, 30 seconds, and the SpeedStor banner comes up followed by the message: ERROR: Invalid/Unrecognized machine type. Batch aborted. My machine is an original Compaq Portable, no accelerator cards or anything. Norton Utils know what it is, PC Tech Journal Benchmarks know what it is, but SpeedStor doesn't? Hmmmmmm!!!! At this point the main menu appears. I thought, "Well, there's this "type" menu choice so I'll try that. It asks me for the drive manufacturer. Mistubishi, my drive, is on the list. Then it asks me which specific drive I have, MR535 (40 MB MFM), again exactly correct except for the size, my drive is actually 65 MB RLL, something is afoot!. I choose this and the machine promptly freezes up. Wait several minutes - maybe it's thinking. Still nothing; no drive motion, nothing. Reboot time. Several subsequent tries also result in nothing gained. A look at appendicies gives a list of command line parameters. I try /SECS:26 to inform the program I have an RLL controller. Now the size information is correct but the computer still freezes. Then I try the /DMA switch which avoids 64KB DMA boundaries. This, I think, may be the problem because Fastback says there is a problem with the DMA controller when it runs, although no other program has informed me of this. Still no affect on SpeedStor. Call Tech Support and try tomorrow. Tech Support, which called me back 5 minutes after I left my name and phone number, suggests the /NOTYPE switch. PRESTO! I can choose the drive and size with no problem! This I should have tried myself. BTW: The install batch file with /NOTYPE still couldn't correctly recognize the machine type so I had to do stuff manually. Now on to the real work. My controller makes DOS think there are two drives attached to the controller, not one large drive with two partitions so I had to delete all the partitions on both drives since SpeedStor won't modify them on the fly, an understandable requirement. Anyhow, I created a minimal c drive, 2 MB, just enough for DOS and batch files and a large, contiguous 64MB drive which spanned my two "drives". From this point things were easy. I restored all my files no problem, chkdsk, dir, Epsilon, XyWrite, MathCad all work with the big drive! I'm ecstatic. More, I can add a second, third etc. additional physical drives and SpeedStor will span those into one large continuous drive d:. And to add to my joy I looked at a coworkers machine with DOS 4.01. On an absolutely bare DOS system he has 480 bytes more free memory after boot than I do! And I don't have 4.xx's compatibility problems. So I got the benefit of big drives and didn't take a big memory hit. A side note: The documentation mentions a version 6.1 but the disk and executing program report version 6.0.3. I asked Tech Support and they said this is indeed correct, 6.0.3 is the latest version, there is no 6.1. Also, there's no registration card; Tech Support said to call them periodically and they'll send you an update, I don't know the cost. All in all, I'm happy with what I have now. Until I'm ready to move up to OS/2 1.2, which I have at work and love, this will do nicely. Thanks to all who replied I appreciate your prompt and informative mail. I'm sorry I can't give you credit here since I didn't keep the messages but you know who you are! Terry