marshall@wind55.seri.gov (Marshall L. Buhl) (06/13/90)
Whew! I finally got it to work. I've been trying to create a permanent swapfile for 386 Enhanced Mode with no luck. I tried all the usual things: Win /R, No other programs running, renamed SHARE.EXE, etc., but couldn't get the swapfile generation program to run. I kept getting an error window saying the no swapfile was created. I tried to call MS yesterday, but couldn't get through - phone busy. I tried again today and finally got through on the third try. Since they expected the wait for an organic support tech to be long, the machine recommended I try the automated answer thingy. I did. What a waste - it's mostly just a polite RTFM. It may help answer really trivial questions, but not this one. It took about 5-10 minutes to get through after that. The support guy was really nice and his spirits seemed high considering what those poor folks must be going through right now. I told him my story and he walked me through it again. No luck. I asked him if he wanted to see my CONFIG.SYS and he said yes. I decided to start Notepad to look at it and he suggested I use SysEdit instead. I added it to my Editing Program Group and went to run it. I got an error: Can't find W:\\SYSTEM.INI. The double "\" was really there. I said I was using SUBST to create a W: drive for my Windows directory. He said "Don't do that." I said that I vaguely remembered something about problems with SUBST, but had been using it for two weeks with no other problems. He said the problem was with installation. I guess I didn't realize that setting up the swap file was installation. Anyhow, after getting rid of my substitutions, I had no problems creating my 16 MB swapfile. While I had him on the phone, I asked him if the swapfile would have its archive bit set upon exit from Windows. He didn't know. The reason I asked is that four days a week I do incremental backups onto floppies. I didn't want the DOS BACKUP program to try and back it up onto 15 floppies. Anyway, after leaving Windows, I looked at the file. It's called 386SPART.PAR and it's in the root of drive C. It had the System and Hidden flags set, but not the Archive bit. It looks like it won't give me a problem. If it did, I would have modified my BYE program to reset the bit whenever I shutdown my system. I sure wish they hadn't put it in my root where it uglies up directory listings. I have taken great pride in finding ways to reduce the number of files in my root (two hidden, system files and FASTTRAX.CMD). I even keep COMMAMD.COM elsewhere. So now I have four files. If anyone knows how I can move it to the Windows directory, I'd like to hear about it. I never did figure out how to move FASTTRAX.CMD. Thanks for listening, Marshall -- Marshall L. Buhl, Jr. EMAIL: marshall@seri.gov Senior Computer Engineer VOICE: (303)231-1014 Wind Research Branch 1617 Cole Blvd., Golden, CO 80401-3393 Solar Energy Research Institute Solar - safe energy for a healthy future
marshall@wind55.seri.gov (Marshall L. Buhl) (06/13/90)
I previously wrote: >While I had him on the phone, I asked him if the swapfile would have its >archive bit set upon exit from Windows. He didn't know. The reason I >asked is that four days a week I do incremental backups onto floppies. I >didn't want the DOS BACKUP program to try and back it up onto 15 >floppies. Anyway, after leaving Windows, I looked at the file. It's >called 386SPART.PAR and it's in the root of drive C. It had the System >and Hidden flags set, but not the Archive bit. It looks like it won't >give me a problem. If it did, I would have modified my BYE program to >reset the bit whenever I shutdown my system. Well, I went to do an incremental backup to floppies this AM and sure enough, it tried to backup up that huge swapfile. I modified my automatic backup program to turn off the archive bit with the ATTRIB command. It wouldn't work - file was hidden. So I used an old PD CATT program to reset the system and hidden bits. That fixed it. Win3 still works fine too. I can't use CATT in my program because it's interactive - otherwise it would have been better. I guess if I had that CATT program from PC Mag, then I could have left the file as system-hidden. I guess there is little reason to backup the swapfile even when I'm going to tape. I doubt if there is anything useful in it. I use SY-TOS, so I can tell it to exclude the swapfile from the backup. I'll find out if it works Friday when I'm scheduled for a full backup. g -- Marshall L. Buhl, Jr. EMAIL: marshall@seri.gov Senior Computer Engineer VOICE: (303)231-1014 Wind Research Branch 1617 Cole Blvd., Golden, CO 80401-3393 Solar Energy Research Institute Solar - safe energy for a healthy future