ronp@cs.umr.edu (Ron Pacheco) (06/23/91)
I have seen some discussion on problems with MS-DOS 5.0 SmartDrive and thought I would contribute my experience. Up front, I estimate the IQ of SmartDrive under MS-DOS 5.0 at about one, and that is a generous estimate. I have a ZEOS 386/33 machine, and regularly run Windows 3.0 (in enhanced mode, of course). I have had no problems whatsoever with the system, hardware or software, until DOS 5.0 SmartDrive. The adventure begins... Last week I installed the MS-DOS 5.0 upgrade, and installed SmartDrive (I had been using it under MS-DOS 4.01 for quite some time with no problems). Things seemed to be okay the first day. The next day, however, a program I ran reported itself as having been modified. My first thought was "Virus!", but this has since been ruled out. So, I ran CHKDSK. The CHKDSK program reported one lost cluster. No big deal, I thought, these occur every now and then, especially when I accidentally kill communication programs which were running in the background downloading files. :o So...I used CHKDSK itself to fix the lost cluster. That's when things really got bad. Strange things began to happen, and another run of CHKDSK reported fifty plus lost clusters in several chains, and a whole list of cross linked files! I began to become a bit concerned. Next...fearing for the safety of my thesis and the other really important stuff on my hard drive (you know, Commander Keen, all of the King's Quest series -- King's Quest V is a MUST, by the way; the 256 color graphics are unbelievable -- etc.), I decided to back things up. To do this, I boot from a floppy so that I am using a "clean" (no strange drivers, disk caches, etc.) system. I booted MS-DOS 5.0 from a floppy and ran CHKDSK on my hard drive...it reported NO PROBLEMS! I also scanned the entire disk for viruses using the three most comprehensive virus scanners. Nothing. Now, wait a minute! I was getting conflicting reports here from the same CHKDSK program (of course, this is a feature of most MicroSoft software anyway :). I decided to boot from the hard drive. HARDWARE ILLEGAL INSTRUCTION TRAP! Wow...this was getting good. My thesis due in one week and my computer decides its time for technical problems. Not knowing what happened, suspecting a possible hard disk glitch, I backed up the entire drive (which is fun because I do not yet have a tape drive on this system...luckily the disk is only 130 meg... :). After doing this, I reinstalled DOS 4.01, and then reinstalled the version 5.0 upgrade (with SmartDrive, just as before). Things were going just fine, until I started restoring files from the backups. The restoration was moving along just find, and then ALL OF A SUDDEN nearly every file in one directory was reported as failing a CRC test upon being restored. I stopped restoring and ran CHKDSK. Again, one lost cluster reported. Hmmmn? Isn't this how all this got started? Instead of attempting to fix it with CHKDSK, I ran Norton Disk Doctor. NDD also reported one lost cluster. Okay, this time I decided to see what a clean DOS system thought before I did anything else to the hard drive. I rebooted from a clean floppy, and guess what. CHKDSK reported NO PROBLEMS with the hard drive, and neither did NDD. So, I decided to see what DOS on the hard drive thought about all this. An attempt to reboot from the hard drive resulted in a hardware illegal instruction trap. Oh no, here we go again. After rebooting from a floppy, I ran diagnostics on the memory and hard disk, and uncovered nothing. I really did not suspect the hardware, but you never know... While running off a floppy, I renamed my CONFIG.SYS file to CONFIG.SAV. The machine now booted from the hard disk without incident. After a couple more hours of "playing" with various configurations of my CONFIG.SYS file, I began to suspect SmartDrive. Whenever SmartDrive was loaded, things would seem to go wrong with the hard drive, but would not be reported as a problem when the system was booted from a clean floppy. Also, whenever SmartDrive was activated by CONFIG.SYS, the machine would sometimes refuse to boot due to a hardware illegal instruction trap. I have since reinstalled DOS 5.0 again, and am not using SmartDrive. The machine has performed flawlessly without SmartDrive (I am using Norton's fast cache for the time being). ZEOS technical support informed me that no other such problem had been reported to them, gave me a few hardware switch settings to verify (which I have), and suggested it might be an incompatibility with the Mylex BIOS. They are sending a Phoenix BIOS so I can give it a whirl. I was actually relieved to see a posting to the newsgroup about other problems with SmartDrive under DOS 5.0. I sympathized with the problems, but my faith in my hardware was somewhat restored. Anyone else out there with similar experiences? Especially on ZEOS 386 machines? -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ron Pacheco "puh-check'-oh" 8-) ronp@cs.umr.edu
bgeer@javelin.sim.es.com (Bob Geer) (06/24/91)
[SmartDrive-DOS5 problem report deleted...] I had troubles with SmartDrive running under Win3 & DOS401 on my DTK386-20 w/ 5megs -- I was getting spurious hard disk errors. After a bout of running CHKDSK while in Win3 [no no no!] & really creating havoc, I reloaded everything from scratch, removed SmartDrive from config.sys, & the system's operation has been flawless; well, not flawless, but at least no disk problems have occured. I run without a cache; neanderthal, I know, but then, I'm patient. -- <> Bob `Bear' Geer <> bgeer%javelin.sim.es.com (this *should* work) <> <> cola-zombie <> speaking only for myself, one of my many tricks <> <> Salt Lake City, <> "We must strive to be more than we are, Lal." <> <> Ootah <> -- Cmdr. Data, learning schmaltz <>
cpm5479@zeus.tamu.edu (Christopher Menzel) (06/24/91)
In article <2848@umriscc.isc.umr.edu>, ronp@cs.umr.edu (Ron Pacheco) writes... >I have seen some discussion on problems with MS-DOS 5.0 SmartDrive and >thought I would contribute my experience. Up front, I estimate the IQ >of SmartDrive under MS-DOS 5.0 at about one, and that is a generous >estimate. > >[Detailed account of SmartDrive problems omitted.] > >Anyone else out there with similar experiences? Nothing as scary as what you detail, but irksome nonetheless. First day I used DOS 5 everything seemed okay. Second day, when I started to give it a more rigorous workout my system (Dell 220 20 MHz 286, 4 meg) started to hang or reboot itself when I'd try to run a DOS program from Windows about half the time; by the end of the day it happened pretty much every time. Tried everything, finally isolated SmartDrive as the culprit. Replaced it with the cache that came with PC Tools 6 (which seems to speed things up at least as well as SmartDrive) and the system hasn't hung once since--and believe me, I've tried hard to break it to make sure. I should note that I had the same problem intermittently when I was using DOS 3.3 and running the SmartDrive that came with Windows. Seems likely to me that it was the culprit then as well. Chris