wales@valeria.cs.ucla.edu (Rich Wales) (09/03/90)
In article <4243@trantor.harris-atd.com> sonny@trantor.harris-atd.com (Bob Davis) writes: While I am at this, I'll ask about confusion I have about this bringing up 3.5 inch floppies on a DOS 3.3 system: WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE drivparm COMMAND AND THE device=driver.sys ..... APPROACH TO LETTING THE SYSTEM KNOW ABOUT 3.5 INCH FLOPPIES? Using DRIVPARM=... takes a little less RAM than DEVICE=DRIVER.SYS does. DRIVPARM= sticks the parameters you specify into a table which is used by DOS's builtin generic driver. DEVICE=DRIVER.SYS loads a separate copy of the generic driver (with the specified parameters). If you use DEVICE=DRIVER.SYS, there will also be a difference in the drive ID letter assigned to the floppy drive in question. My recollec- tion from using this approach was that I had to call my second floppy drive (a 3.5"/1.44Mb unit) drive "D" instead of "B". Actually, I think the same unit responded to both "B" and "D" -- though the parameters were different for the two designations. Given a choice, I would recommend using DRIVPARM= instead of DRIVER.SYS. One problem with DRIVPARM= is that the original release of MS-DOS 3.3 had a bug in the CONFIG.SYS command parsing code. Although DRIVPARM= was documented, and the code to handle it was there, it didn't work. There are two solutions to this DRIVPARM= parsing problem: (1) Get MS-DOS 3.30A. If your MS-DOS 3.3 is the "generic" version from Microsoft (i.e., not modified by the vendor for your clone), you can call Microsoft technical support and get the replacement disks for free. Otherwise, you'll have to bring the issue up with the people who made your clone -- and hope they (a) know about 3.30A and (b) have bothered to get it. (2) Include one or more "control-A" characters immediately after the equals sign in your "DRIVPARM=" line. This will reportedly sidestep the parsing bug. Some vendors may have fixed the DRIVPARM= bug on their own -- and/or used 3.30A while still calling it 3.3. So, before you do anything else, try DRIVPARM= without the "control-A" hack and see if it works for you. -- -- Rich Wales <wales@CS.UCLA.EDU> // UCLA Computer Science Department 3531 Boelter Hall // Los Angeles, CA 90024-1596 // +1 (213) 825-5683 "You must not drink the tea. It is deadly to humans."