elee24@castle.ed.ac.uk (H Bruce) (10/10/90)
I had a problem with my PC recently and posted the following message to news net. > I have a 386 AT clone with an unpartitioned 100Mb hard disk running DOS 4.01. > > I have been running Microsoft QuickC (v1.01) successfully for several months. > But recently it has started hanging the PC at the linking phase > (when it prints "Linking" in the Current File window). > A window appears with the message WRITE FAULT in it and prompts > for RETRY or CANCEL. RETRY causes the window to reappear and CANCEL hangs > the PC (this is undocumented in the Quick C manual). > > When the PC is rebooted the files $$qc$$.lnk and $$qc$$.obj are in the > directory where qc crashed. The file link.err is created but is empty. > If qc is re-invoked the C program is said to be up to date and runs OK. > > The link program functions correctly when the cl and qcl commands > are invoked from the command line. > > The WRITE FAULT window would appear to indicate a hard disk problem, > but chkdsk returns no errors. Many thanks to the people who replied. The replies that I received indicated that there is a bug with DOS 4.0. One major enhancement over DOS 3.3 is the ability to handle hard disks > 32Mb. However DOS 4.0 appears to have problems in accessing files when a large (> 100Mb) hard disk is unpartitioned and at any time has been more than about 60% full. In an attempt to overcome this bug, DOS 4.0 automatically loads the SHARE program for disks of over 32Mb (this should not be necessary for a single user system) but apparently this does not fully solve the problem. One suggestion was to use a shareware COMMAND.COM alternative called 4DOS. When I installed 4DOS Quick C functioned correctly along with several other programs that were occasionally misbehaving. (This was particularly ironic as DOS and QuickC are both Microsoft products !) When I contacted the authors of 4DOS, they confirmed this DOS 4.0 bug. Thus it appears to users of lage disks should partition them if DOS 4.0 is to be used successfully. Henry Bruce.