[comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d] Zoo not working on a 386?

kevin@kosman.UUCP (Kevin O'Gorman) (12/09/89)

I sent some stuff to another machine, all packed up in a .ZOO archive.
BRIK says the checksums are the same, but the other machine gets a
bunch of odd errors unpacking the archive.  There are no troubles with
the disk, but ZOO reports a fatal error, or disk full condition.

The 386 is running 3.xx MSDOS, but a version that supports large
disk partitions, and in fact the partition in which this was done
is about 500K, with 200K actually in use.

I don't remember for sure, but I think this copy of ZOO.EXE is one
gleaned from c.b.i.p. some time ago.

Anybody know why this is happening, or what I can do about it?

jdreyer@pdp8.East.Sun.COM (Jonathan Dreyer - Sun BOS PC Distributed Systems) (12/14/89)

In article <1046@kosman.UUCP> kevin@kosman.UUCP (Kevin O'Gorman) writes:
>ZOO reports a fatal error, or disk full condition.
>
>The 386 is running 3.xx MSDOS, but a version that supports large
>disk partitions, and in fact the partition in which this was done
>is about 500K, with 200K actually in use.
>
>Anybody know why this is happening, or what I can do about it?

Some PC-NFS customers ran into a similar problem with Zoo 2.01
writing to NFS drives on certain servers.  The problem turned out
to be how PC-NFS and Zoo conspired to blow away the results of
a DOS FreeSpace (function 36h) call.  This call returns (for our
purposes) the number of sectors in an allocation unit in AX,
the sector size in CX, and the number of free allocation units
in BX.  To find the amount of free space you must multiply the
three numbers together.  Unfortunately Zoo was doing the first
multiplication (AX * CX) in a 16-bit short.  In our case this was not
a good idea because with this server the result was always zero,
so Zoo always reported "not enough room" or some such.
(The interesting part fell off the end of the word).  Given that
your DOS has been modified to allow large partitions, it's possible
that it has the same problem.

We solved the problem in PC-NFS by ensuring that AX * CX fits into
a word, but ideally Zoo should do the entire multiplication in a
long.  Rahul knows of this problem, and I imagine the fix will come
out in the next rev of Zoo.

By the way, Zoo's behavior regarding the computation of free space
is sanctioned by none other than the DOS tech ref, so one might argue
that the fault is with PC-NFS and your DOS, not with Zoo, but Zoo
might as well obey the robustness principle here.

(un    Jon Dreyer     Sun Microsystems      jdreyer@east.sun.com
) (    508-671-0385   Two Federal Street    sun!suneast!jdreyer
un)                   Billerica MA 01821    "I have no claim."