Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!dptg!ulysses!ucbvax!ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU!karlson
From: karlson@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Eric Karlson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: XT hard drive booting problem (corrupted system files?)
Summary: Don't touch that IBMIO.SYS
Message-ID: <38777@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 21 Sep 90 01:33:04 GMT
References: <20404@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: karlson@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Eric Karlson)
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Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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In 20404@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU, he mentioned that the Norton Disk Doctor
noticed bad sectors in the IBMIO.SYS file and moved them. I think this
was almost certainly a mistake. While it is the case that DOS for different
machines can be a little different (a wonderful notion for a machine
independent OS), I believe that it is universally true that the BIOS
file on bootable disks MUST be located in contiguous sectors at the
begining of the Disk Data Area. I don't know exactly what NDD did
when it moved them in terms of changing reserved sectors and so forth,
but from the sound of it, it didn't know that it was dealing with a
special file that needed a special location on the disk.

SPINRITE seems to be a very thorough piece of software, but if it was
given a disk that had its bootable files messed with I can't see how
it would correct for that. You might want to try saving all the files on
your harddisk to some other (secure) medium and then reformating the
disk so that the special files are placed back in the right areas and
the formatter can set up the disk to correctly handle those sectors that
are bad. Off-hand, I can't think of any other way to deal with the
situation.

							Eric Karlson