From: greve AT rs1 DOT thch DOT uni-bonn DOT de (Thomas Greve)
Subject: Re: hard disk gone
To: dj AT ctron DOT com (DJ Delorie)
Date: Tue, 23 Jun 92 13:28:44 NFT
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu

> 
> To settle the masses, it has been noted in a past discussion that some
> systems are prone to giving bad data back from the drive (or to the
> drive) under heavy load, regardless of the application performing the
> request. (That's settling?)  Go32, under paging load, does a *lot* of
> access, and MSDOS/BIOS/Hardware just can't get it right, and the disk
> gets bad data written to it.
> 
> In the case of go32, providing enough memory to prevent paging will
> limit the number of accesses requested.  Go32 never uses BIOS to write
> to the disk, just DOS calls.  Most disk crashes are due to FAT
> problems, which is not caused directly by go32, but by the amount of
> traffic.
> 
> It's bad when a disk gets confused.  I always keep NDD.EXE and
> CHKDSK.EXE on a bootable floppy just in case, and I've had to use them
> on more than a few occasions, and not all for go32 development.

Oh, yes. I knew this problem very well on a weaker sort of platform
(386 AT 20), but it has gone now (on a 486 AT 33 :-).

Nevertheless: what about a paging *partition* instead of a file? You
could access it by BIOS calls and dump the DOS-FAT-Junk.

				- Thomas

   greve AT rs1 DOT thch DOT uni-bonn DOT de
   unt145 AT dbnrhrz1