rloew

I never said everything would work perfectly or not require Patching, but it is doable.

Thanks again for telling me. It's clear to know that DOS 5 through 6.22 has no support for Logical Block Addressing which indeed limits the size of the hard disk (and other media) to 8,025 MB. The limit for normal Logical Hard Drives is 8GB but the limit of other media can be higher. CD/DVD/BD Media use 2KB Sectors so 32GB can be accessed via CHS.

The Bootstrap Code is a separate issue. It only limits the C: Partition to 2GB in the first 8GB. Other Partitions are not affected. I have written a Bootstrap for DOS 7 that has no limits on C:. It should be adaptable to DOS 6.22. A DDO is required for more than 8GB total on a single Hard Drive as DOS 6.22 uses CHS which can only address 8GB with standard Sector sizes. The DDO I wrote is small enough that I embedded it within IO.SYS 6.22.

You may have copied other Windows ME files that you shouldn't have. Try replacing NTMAPHLP.PDR with the one in NUSB. It will be in WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS.

Not sure. I already did the hard work patching DOS 7. I mainly would have to port the existing patches over. I also would have to combine my drive splitter DDO with my BOOTMAN2 DDO. Of course without FAT-32 it will never support PetaByte Drives as DOS 7 can. The only bug in IO.SYS 6.22, other than the design limitations, is in it's bootstrap code. I have designed a replacement Boot Loader for DOS 7 that could probably be adapted. The bugs are in COMMAND.COM and elsewhere. For this purpose DOS 6.22 only needs to accept Type 0xF Partitions as if they were Type 5. This is needed for DOS 7 compatability. DOS 6.22 only supports CHS so it cannot treat the two Partition types differently. I have already done this with a small snippet of code.

Replace USBMPHLP.PDR with the one in NUSB. It will be in WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS.

I ran some tests. I did not see any data corruption. CHKDSK will report corruption. DOS SCANDISK with not run. Windows ME SCANDISK shows no corruption. Some utilities will think there is no free disk space such as DIR and DEBUG. I used my own Formatter (RFORMAT) to format the Partition. I patched it to think that a type 0xF Partition was a Type 5 Partition. There is no need to recognize Type 0xE Partitions unless you need multiple Primary Partitions in DOS 7. With my existing Patches, 48GB is the limit, for all normal Partitions combined, due to Drive Letter limits. The limit is 96GB with the NT Format, 94GB if booted from the C: Partition. If I ported all of my Terabyte Plus Patches from DOS 7 to DOS 6.22, and wrote a new DDO, the limit could be pushed to between 8TB and 12TB.

The DDO makes the Hard Drive appears as a number of smaller Hard Drives. Some require repartitioning, some don't. The ones that do gave DDOs a bad name. Either way these DDOs will not help as they are designed for a different purpose. They only add support for Hard Disks larger than the Computer BIOS can support. They do not split the Disk into smaller parts. I designed my DDO from scratch. I also Patched IO.SYS 6.22 to recognize Type 0xF Partitions. The 31.5GB limit is due to some other limitation of the DDO. True, the limit is 48GB if you stick with conventional formatting. Windows NT formatting allows DOS 6.22 to have 4GB Partitions. I'm sure I can bump that up to 8GB with a few mods. I actually only used 16 GB for DOS 6.22 leaving the remainder for DOS 7. Combined with a Boot Drive of 8GB, this gave me C: - N:.

There is a way to use more than 8GB with DOS 6.22. I created a DDO that made a 64GB Hard Drive look like 8 8GB Hard Drives. By careful arrangement, I was able to setup 8 2GB Partitions for DOS 6.22 and DOS 7 as well as 8GB Partitions for DOS 7 only.

If I strip out the two lines in [Path] at the beginning of MSDOS.SYS and keep HostWinBootDrv=C paramenter: WinDir=C:\WINDOWS WinBootDir=C:\WINDOWS Windows 3.0 would boot on a FAT32 partition. However, doing that under Virtual PC causes the screen to go blank when Windows 3.0 is run in 386 Enhanced Mode. I'll probably give it a go and test Windows 3.0 under DOS 7.1 in VMware soon. I tested a ran Windows 3.0 VM with MS-DOS 5.0 and it worked okay without problems. When I ran my experiments, I had to limit RAM to 15MB and enable EMM386.

I examined the files and did not find any suspicious code. I inserted the 3.0 Version into my Windows 3.1 Setup. I did not see any Current Directory corruption on exit. If the problem exists in 3.0 then it probably occurs elsewhere.

I would need to find copies of WIN386.EXE for Windows 3.0 and 3.0a before I could answer that. I am not familiar with the 16MB limit. Should I send you a e-mail for the details? In a DOSBox machine, I had to set the memory limit to 64 MB, copy the KRNL286.EXE, KRNL386.EXE and WIN386.EXE files from a Windows 3.1 installation and for some reason...Windows 3.0 would throw me back to DOS. As you're not familiar with the 16 MB limit, I will have to revert the changes until further notice. More about the memory limits at this page: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/84388 A temporary workaround for a Windows 3.0 installation with more than 16 MB of system memory would be to create a RAM disk drive to occupy the amount of memory until the total amount of physical memory is 16 MB of less. 1. If the amount of memory installed is 24 MB, then a 8 MB RAM disk would need to be created. 2. If the amount of memory installed is 32 MB, then a 16 MB RAM disk would need to be created. 3. If the amount of memory installed is 48 MB, then a 32 MB RAM disk would need to be created. 4. If the amount of memory installed is 64 MB, then a 48 MB RAM disk would need to be created and you will have to use a third-party RAM disk driver such as XMSDisk. If you use Microsoft's RAMDRIVE.SYS driver then at least two RAM disk drives, a 32 MB and a 16 MB would be created. I would assume that the Current Directory Fix for Windows 3.0 would involve finding the same pattern and replacing it with the same data as Windows 3.1. If not, you can E-Mail me the two Versions to examine. Fixing the memory limitation probably would involve a significant amount of work. The very limited number of users and the availability of Windows 3.1 makes this unworthwhile. I already have a memory limiter that can set the available memory to anything I want.

AHCI is out of the question. It is NOT compatable with Windows 9X. There appears to be a Driver for AHCI in DOS called AHCI.SYS. RAID Mode requires a modified GCDROM.SYS I use AMD nearly exclusively, so I don't have any recent Intel Products to test any fixes on.

The "MSCDEX.EXE" was from the Boot Image and not sure what version/who made it since it's compressed with PKLITE and doesn't easily "unpack". Not really sure if it's proprietary or not.edit - ...and MAYBE I just used the GCDROM.SYS wrong? http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdromdosdrv/ http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/gcdrom.htm (search for it) - http://www.mdgx.com/drv.htm also some info on "failure to function" - http://www.computing.net/answers/dos/dos-dvd-driver/17073.html IOW, YMMV... I have successfully used GCDROM on the one Computer that needed it. I have no idea about any other. There may be better solutions out there. I later modded GCDROM so that it could be used with the SATA controller in RAID mode as this solved a separate issue.

The SATA Patch is for Windows. You will need a DOS SATA CDROM Driver such as GCDROM to install Windows from a SATA CD Drive. A Floppy, bootable CD or bootable USB Drive will be needed to add the SATA Patch unless it is slipstreamed into the CD. The High Capacity Disk Patch is stil needed if the SATA Drive is larger than 137GB.

I would need to find copies of WIN386.EXE for Windows 3.0 and 3.0a before I could answer that. I am not familiar with the 16MB limit.

When I posted those Patches, I did not have Windows 3.0 handy. It probably can be Patched also.

It may not be harmless if you attempt to write into the Current Directory. There is no link as far as I know. I wrote the Patch myself.

You are referring to "Advanced Format" Drive that have 4KB Physical Sectors. Advanced Format Drives require special Formatting to avoid performance problems, but they are compatable with Windows 9x with the 137GB Fix. I am referring to 4KB Logical Sector Drives which are not compatable without my Terabyte Plus Patches. Currently only certain USB Hard Drives use 4KB Logical Sectors.

Only the Current Directory Pointer in RAM is affected. There is no corruption on the Hard Drive itself. CDing to an absolute Path will also clear the bug. I added a Patch to Windows 3 to fix this problem.

It appears that Hitachi and possibly others are selling some 2TB, and possibly smaller, USB Hard Drives using 4KB Logical Sectors. These Drives are incompatable with Windows 9X without Patching. I just purchased a Touro Desk 2TB USB 3.0 Drive on Black Friday that did this. Previously I had only seen this done on USB Drives larger than 2TiB. My Patched System supports these Drives but others don't. If more Drives come out using 4KB Logical Sectors, Windows 9X users will have fewer options for large USB Drives.

Windows 3 trashes the Current Directory entry upon exit if the drive is formatted to FAT32.

I have a dual-boot DOS 6.2/Windows 98 system with an 8GB and 64GB Hard Drives. I developed a DDO that runs with DOS 6.2 that makes the 64GB Hard Drive appear as 8 8GB Hard Drives. With careful partitioning of the 64GB Hard Drive, including creating dummy partitions, I was able to share 12 2GB Partitions between both OSes. I could have shared 24 but I needed some larger FAT32 Partitions for data. With Patches, DOS 7.1 can handle 8MB Clusters (256 Sectors of 32KB each), and can handle up to 3PB Hard Drives with a DDO, 48TB without. Wow! That's pretty interesting. I kinda find it really weird to see MS-DOS 6.2 fully recongise the 64 GB hard disk as 8 8 GB hard drives with a Dynamic Drive Overlay that you developed, even if MS-DOS 6.22 and below will not support hard disks over 7.8 GB. The limit for a single Drive Letter in CHS is 1024x255x63x512 Bytes which is 8422686720 Bytes. This is 8.4GB or 7.8GiB. The two different ways of describing capacity can be confusing at times. I rounded to the nearest GB. The eighth simulated drive was a little smaller as the drive was less than 8 times the limit.

I have a dual-boot DOS 6.2/Windows 98 system with an 8GB and 64GB Hard Drives. I developed a DDO that runs with DOS 6.2 that makes the 64GB Hard Drive appear as 8 8GB Hard Drives. With careful partitioning of the 64GB Hard Drive, including creating dummy partitions, I was able to share 12 2GB Partitions between both OSes. I could have shared 24 but I needed some larger FAT32 Partitions for data. With Patches, DOS 7.1 can handle 8MB Clusters (256 Sectors of 32KB each), and can handle up to 3PB Hard Drives with a DDO, 48TB without.

I would use the full version, if the patch gave me (normal) Windows, but all I can get is safe Mode. Try using the /M Option of my Patch.