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From: fredex@cg-atla.UUCP (Fred Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Problems with sys
Keywords: upgrade sys hidden files
Message-ID: <7775@cg-atla.UUCP>
Date: 16 Oct 89 13:38:18 GMT
References: <4495@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: fredex@cg-atla.UUCP (Fred Smith)
Organization: Agfa Compugraphic Division
Lines: 43

In article <4495@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> aj5@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Bill Basden) writes:
>
>    I'm having some trouble upgrading from PC-DOS 3.1 to MS-DOS 3.3 on 
>my 386 clone.  When I try to sys my hard drive, I get a 'not enough
>room' error.  I suspect that this is because the hidden files are
>bigger in 3.3,  but I thought that the hidden dos and bios files no longer
>had to be contiguous.
>
>    Any suggestions on how I can do this without reformating my 80 meg
>hard drive?
>
>
>Thanks!
>
>Bill Basden
>aj5@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Internet)
>pur-ee!mentor.cc.purdue.edu!aj5 (uucp)




This problem is likely due to the fact that you are replacing IBM PCDOS with
some other vendor's MSDOS. If you look at the hidden files in the root directory
of your hard disk you will see two files named IBMBIO.sys and IBMDOS.sys. MSDOS
(not PCDOS) uses different names, usually IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS (depending on
the vendor).

If you sneak in there and change the names of those two files thusly:

  IBMDOS.SYS ==> MSDOS.SYS
  IBMBIO.sys ==>    IO.SYS

then the MSDOS sys command should work just peachy. I would recommend booting from
a floppy before doing this, just for safety's sake. You can do this with the
Norton Utilities or PCTools, for example.

I have recently upgraded an XT from PCDOS 3.10 to PCDOS 3.30 without trouble, but I
do know (having run into it before) that upgrading across-vendors can sometimes
cause this problem.

Good luck!

Fred