shell@hoptoad.uucp (Shelly Culbertson) (12/12/89)
Thanks again to everyone who gave me advice! It was only from learning from all of those responses that I finally arrived at a solution. I'm posting a synopsis here for the benefit of others who expressed interest in knowing the solution. The original problem was a sudden inability to boot my AT-clone from the hard drive. If I booted with a system disk in drive a, everything appeared to be fine on drive c. Using PCTools, I mapped the hard disk and discovered that io.sys and msdos.sys, though intact, were not in the proper location on the disk -- instead of at the beginning, they were somewhere in the middle. I still don't know how they got there. Other data were occupying the sectors where they should have been. So I deleted those files, then used a shareware disk organizer (dog205c) to rearrange the files on the hard disk in order of their directories. Thus I knew what was occupying the space where the system files were supposed to be, so I backed it up then deleted that too. Then, with the appropriate sectors free, I did "sys c:" with dos 3.3 in the a drive, and it finally worked. It was really nice to finally watch it boot up again under it's own steam! I don't know if Norton Utilities or Spinrite would have helped since I didn't try them. But I think the whole experience was worth it for the amount I learned! (I didn't even know what a system file *was* before this!) Thanks again for all the help. Shelly Culbertson shell@hoptoad.UUCP voice: (707) 839-2265