rb9a@watt.acc.Virginia.EDU (Raul Baragiola) (11/18/90)
I have a Shamrock 386SX with 2MB RAM and SCSI drive. Windows works fine if I don't use a permanent swapfile. If I do, it still works fine with one or two applications open. Sometimes, when trying to open a new application I get the message: General Failure error reading drive C Invalid COMMAND.COM Cannot load COMMAND System Halted THis is not very friendly. Now, my C drive is perfect, there are no bad blocks (as tested by Norton NDD and by MACE Utilities) and this error message NEVER appears when I am not running WIndows or when I use just a temporary swapfile. I suspected problems with the SCSI interface and tried to exclude EMM above A000 and set the Hard disk IRQ off in the setup. Can anyone suggest how to solve this problem? I would also like to know more about this permanent swapfile and the way Win3 uses to access it. For instance, I notice that Win3 refuses to create a swapfile if one is using Disk Manager dmdriv.bin driver. I suspect there is something not quite right in the way Win3 handles swapfiles. Does anyone know if it is a bug and if there are any updates to fix it? Thank you, Raul Raul A. Baragiola \Internet: raul@virginia.edu Dept. Nuclear Engnr. and Engnr. Physics \Phone: (804)-982-2907 University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22901 \ Fax: (804)-924-6270
yoshida@hpfcso.HP.COM (Stuart Yoshida) (11/21/90)
rb9a@watt.acc.Virginia.EDU (Raul Baragiola) writes: > I have a Shamrock 386SX with 2MB RAM and SCSI drive. Windows works fine > if I don't use a permanent swapfile. If I do, it still works fine with > one or two applications open. Sometimes, when trying to open a new > application I get the message: > > General Failure error reading drive C > Invalid COMMAND.COM > Cannot load COMMAND > System Halted I have a BSR 386SX formerly with 2MB of RAM and a *non*-SCSI 80MB Seagate drive that did the exact same thing! I *don't* think it's a SCSI interface problem. I believe it's an inherent limitation of Windows and its use of the permanent swapfile. I added 2MB of memory for a total system RAM of 4MB and created a permanent swapfile of about 8MB, and the system worked much better. However, I can *still* crash the system if I keep on firing up mulitple programs, especially ones that require a lot of system memory. This does not happen when I use a temporary swapfile (probably because I haven't fired up enough programs to overload the 20MB of contiguous disk space available for swapping). I've concluded that Windows is running out of swapspace and croaking. Can anyone confirm this? -- Stuart "La vida de paz." --Yolocamba-i-ta' UUCP: {hp-sdd, hp-pcd, csu-cs, edison, hplabs}!hpfcla!yoshida Internet: yoshida%hpfcla@hplabs.HP.COM VOICE: (303) 229-2324