Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!uunet!sjsca4!molehill!poffen
From: poffen@molehill (Russ Poffenberger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: puzzler
Message-ID: <1989Dec11.221205.11140@sj.ate.slb.com>
Date: 11 Dec 89 22:12:05 GMT
References: <9214@hoptoad.uucp> <28301@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Reply-To: poffen@sj.ate.slb.com (Russ Poffenberger)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Schlumberger ATE, San Jose, CA
Lines: 27

In article <28301@amdcad.AMD.COM> phil@diablo.AMD.COM (Phil Ngai) writes:
>In article <9214@hoptoad.uucp> shell@hoptoad.UUCP (Shelly Culbertson) writes:
>|"No room for system on destination drive".  All of my old system files
>|are still there on the hard disk, and it won't let me delete them prior
>|to trying to replace them: "Error: io.sys (or msdos.sys) is read only".
>
>In that case, you need to either use a more powerful deleter
>(something like rm -f) or to change the attributes on the files to
>allow you to delete them with the regular DOS commands. I use MKS
>tools so I would do either rm -f or chmod, but I think DOS has a
>command to change attributes too. 
>
>I don't think spinrite would help you boot from the hard disk but it
>is recommended as a gauge of the health of your disk. 
>

The problem is not with removing the old files from the drive, but the fact
that these system files must occupy the first contiguous block on the disk.
Once user data is written to the disk, those blocks after the boot files will
become occupied, therefore leaving no 'contiguous' space big enough for larger
boot programs.

Russ Poffenberger               DOMAIN: poffen@sj.ate.slb.com
Schlumberger Technologies       UUCP:   {uunet,decwrl,amdahl}!sjsca4!poffen
1601 Technology Drive		CIS:	72401,276
San Jose, Ca. 95110
(408)437-5254