Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decvax!mandrill!neoucom!wtm From: wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: DOS 3.3 feature vaporware? Message-ID: <1104@neoucom.UUCP> Date: 14 Apr 88 15:01:26 GMT References: Organization: Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine Lines: 34 Keywords: %@^@$#^ Summary: DOS braindamge - drivparm dukes it out with the BIOS The DRIVPARM= parameter for CONFIG.SYS is one of the things that has been [quasi?] officially acknowledged as not always working correctly. I have had varying degrees of luck with it on the machines here. It seems to matter what BIOS is in the machines. Machines with dumb BIOS seem to get along better with DRIVPARM= than newer machines. You may want to use the DRIVER.SYS installable device driver instead of DRIVPARM=. DRIVER.SYS takes the same option switches as specifying DRIVPARM=. The advantage is that DRIVER.SYS is self-contained, and would appear from personal experience to have fewer problems with BIOS conflict. The disadvantage with using DRIVER.SYS is that it has to assign a logical drive letter one letter greater than your last physical drive. Thus, on a hard disk system a 1.44 meg 3.5 inch drive is stuck being accessed as drive D when you use the 1.44 meg mode, while it is B: in 720K mode. (The only way I've been able to get 1.44 meg drives work is by using DRIVER.SYS.) One might try supplying the appropriate leading zeros, etc. For instance, you might want to enter the heads switch as /H02. Note that IBM PS/2s have integral support for 1.44 meg, and don't require DRIVER.SYS. I have a PS/2 model 80, and it insists on formatting even 720K disks as 1.44 meg. Maybe it needs a DRIVER.SYS running to go to the low density mode for formatting. The PS/2 seems to correctly sense the density of disks that have already been formatted some place else. By the way, for the record, I don't recommend formatting 720K disks for 1.44 meg. Grrrrr. --Bill