[comp.sys.ibm.pc] Fragmented System files

bagron@cs.vu.nl (Rene Baart) (06/14/88)

I received a lot of responses to my posting about my DOS-upgrade trouble 
(see: DOS 3.21 --> 3.3 problems). Everyone noted that you need a large enough 
contiguous free space at the start of the disk to hold the new system files. I
have DOS 3.3 running at this moment, but when I looked at the hard disk with 
Norton it turned out that MSDOS.SYS is *fragmented* ! It seems that the system
files needn't be contiguous (any more) -- this should take care of the "not 
enough room" error message. Still, I got exactly that error when I first tried
to transfer the system. A few days later, it suddenly worked -- immediately 
after a Speed Disk defragmentation (there simply could not have been any free 
room). The only thing I can think of is that the "media descriptor byte" (the 
first byte in the FAT) had a wrong value, and I fixed that a few days earlier.

And now I have heard rumors about a "DOS 3.4"....... Another upgrade ?

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|         Rene' Baart          |   @@   @@  @@   @@   |      EMAIL :      |
|   Department of Economics    |   @@  @@  @@    @@   +-------------------+
| Free University of Amsterdam |   @@ @@  @@     @@   |  bagron@cs.vu.nl  |
|  Amsterdam, The Netherlands  |   @@@@  @@      @@   | groedr@econ.vu.nl |
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           "..They don't call me ZAPHOD for nothing, you know.."