vanzandt@uiucdcsp.UUCP (02/22/87)
I didn't see the base note for this, but: Have you tried a SET COMSPEC=c:\[path] command? Or does your path command have an 'A:\' somewhere in it? The ComSpec environment variable tells DOS where to look for the Command Interpreter (COMMAND.COM) whenever it needs it; so set it to C: and it won't try reading drive A:... If your path statement has a A:\ parameter, DOS might be trying to access A: for that reason. What would Turbo's dynamic memory allocation have to do with DOS needing COMMAND.COM???? +=============================================================================+ | Lonnie VanZandt University of Illinois Dept. of CS (217) 333-1925 | | | | arpa vanzandt@p.cs.uiuc.edu vanzandt@uiuc.ARPA | | csnet vanzandt@uiuc.csnet | | usenet ihnp4!uiucdcs!vanzandt | +=============================================================================+
madd@bucsb.bu.edu.UUCP (02/26/87)
In article <75800027@uiucdcsp> vanzandt@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu writes: > What would Turbo's dynamic memory allocation have to do with DOS >needing COMMAND.COM???? Simple. COMMAND.COM will preserve itself if it can when loading in programs. If your machine has a lot of memory, you seldom end up reloading the command.com processor. However, if your machine has relatively little memory, command.com will be overwritten when the program loads. After this, DOS will reload command.com from disk. So if you cut down the size of the turbo stack/heap, the odds are better that command.com will survive. Even if the allocation in Turbo is large enough to encompass the area where command.com lives, command.com is not necessarily destroyed. DOS does a check to see if command.com is intact before reloading, in case the program allocated the memory but failed to use it. In this case, it would be useless to reload from disk, so it doesn't. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% - Jim Frost * The Madd Hacker - UUCP: ..!harvard!bu-cs!bucsb!madd | ARPANET: madd@bucsb.bu.edu CSNET: madd%bucsb@bu-cs | BITNET: cscc71c@bostonu -------------------------------+---+------------------------------------ "Oh beer, oh beer." -- Me | [=(BEER) <- Bud the Beer (cheers!)
klotz@aicchi.UUCP (Klotzbach) (03/07/87)
In article <75800027@uiucdcsp> vanzandt@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu writes: > I didn't see the base note for this, but: > What would Turbo's dynamic memory allocation have to do with DOS >needing COMMAND.COM???? Turbo Pascal, like any program that uses dynamic memory runs the risk of overwriting the resident part of COMMAND.COM. If this happens DOS sees that COMMAND.COM must be reloaded and requests it. This generally will not happen if you have TPASCAL version 3.0 and >512k.