xiaoy@ecf.toronto.edu (XIAO Yan) (02/27/91)
I have a T1000SE and am wondering whether it is possible to make use the remaining 256k ROM left over on C:drive, which stores part of DOS now. Compared to the size of memory T10000SE has, that part memory (256k) is really a waste. What's more puzzling is that T1000SE's C drive, the ROM drive, does NOT have a whole version of DOS. I wonder why. Has anybody tried to use that part of ROM? Do you guys have a complete DOS on C: drive? It is quite annoying that I have to resort to floppy to do things like 'sort', or 'append'. Xiao
cbbrowne@csi.uottawa.ca (Christopher Browne (055908)) (02/28/91)
How would one "use" that ROM differently? It's Read Only Memory, which means that its contents can't be changed... Have you heard of some alternative ROM chip that can be plugged in instead? I can't think of any OTHER way of changing the use of the C: ROMS... >Compared to the size of memory T10000SE has, that part memory (256k) is >really a waste. What's more puzzling is that T1000SE's C drive, the ROM >drive, does NOT have a whole version of DOS. I wonder why. Certainly NOT a waste. It IS incomplete - I'd sure like to have GWBASIC in ROM, or some of the other DOS utilities added, but this is certainly better than nothing. A lot of other laptops require that you run DOS from a floppy. To boot, you MUST have a floppy in the drive, and to use ANY of the DOS utilities, you typically need to have SOME sort of drive in action (on a desktop machine, you need a \DOS directory on the hard drive). What's there is certainly not useless. I suppose that they found that the WHOLE set of utilities wouldn't fit on one chip, so they tossed out the ones that someone decided were "least useful." Having 256K of utilities sitting there NOT taking up disk/RamDrive space is certainly nice. >Has anybody tried to use that part of ROM? Do you guys have a complete >DOS on C: drive? It is quite annoying that I have to resort to floppy to >do things like 'sort', or 'append'. I boot from that ROM several times each week. It would be nice to have the extra features in ROM, but that's the price you pay for not having a hard drive :-). And when I want to sort stuff, I don't use DOS's SORT anyway... I use the one published recently in PC Magazine... What I wish is that they'd have put a REAL editor in instead of EDLIN, but I hear that EDLIN doesn't get trashed until DOS 5.0... That's a pity... -- Christopher Browne cbbrowne@csi.uofottawa.ca University of Ottawa Master of System Science Program
dan@rna.UUCP (Dan Ts'o) (03/01/91)
In article <1991Feb27.215507.1178@csi.uottawa.ca> cbbrowne@csi.uottawa.ca (Christopher Browne (055908)) writes: >How would one "use" that ROM differently? It's Read Only Memory, which >means that its contents can't be changed... Have you heard of some alternative >ROM chip that can be plugged in instead? I can't think of any OTHER way >of changing the use of the C: ROMS... > >>Compared to the size of memory T10000SE has, that part memory (256k) is >>really a waste. What's more puzzling is that T1000SE's C drive, the ROM >>drive, does NOT have a whole version of DOS. I wonder why. My understanding is that that space is not wasted. Its not even there. They just built the DOS filesystem on a device that had an extra 256k on it, then did a binary dump of that device onto ROM, without the blank 256k. In fact, newer versions of the T1000SE, I believe, don't say that they have 256K free. They say zero free. This new ROM also has at least one tiny bug change: When I bought my T1000SE, it was February, 1990. The NOW program on the T1000SE misspelled it as Febuary. The new ROM corrects that misspelling. I don't know if it corrected anything else, other than the 256k free. You can check the correction by TYPE C:NOW.* and look for February. Cheers, Dan Ts'o 212-570-7671 Dept. Neurobiology dan@rna.rockefeller.edu Rockefeller Univ. ...phri!rna!dan 1230 York Ave. tso@rockvax.bitnet NY, NY 10021