Is it safe to use scandisk under DOS 7.1 on 32GB system HDD?
How big disks v7.1 support till it starts to make data errors?
Is there anything better for a true, native DOS 7.1 than scandisk?
DOS completely relies on the BIOS to access hard disks, so does scandisk and any other DOS tool. So unless your BIOS has problems with disks larger than 32 GB, there's nothing against using scandisk.
Best utility is Norton Disk Doctor and better get it from Norton Utilities 2001 (v.5.0) last one to include Doctor, Unformat, Unerase, Diskedit.
I am aroused about any X86 motherboard that has full functional ISA slot. I think i have problem. Not really into that original (Turbo) XT,286,386 and CGA/EGA stuff. So just a DOS nut.
PS. If I upload RAR, it is a 16-bit DOS RAR Version 2.50.
I had Win98SE/DOS 7.1 on a 120 GB disk without problems.
Interestingly, that Seagate disk is still working and is used every day (there's XP on it now), having outlived a number of newer and bigger HDDs...
Ok, but is it normal when scandisk reports that there is a "free space" error? Can I choose to fix it? Or will I loose data?
Scandisk will not make you lose data.
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It's a benign glitch on FAT32 partitions and can be safely fixed.
FAT32 (as opposed to FAT12 and FAT16) keeps separate "current free space" value on disk, so that it can be reported faster to the user. Before that, the amount of free space had to be calculated by counting all clusters marked as free, which is much slower.
Sometimes this free-space value gets out of sync with actual amount of free space. Scandisk can easily fix this by updating the counter. No data is lost besides what has been already lost 😉
Thank You all! 😀
wrote:Ok, but is it normal when scandisk reports that there is a "free space" error? Can I choose to fix it? Or will I loose data?
This is the error you'll get most often when running scandisk. Up to MS-DOS 5.0, the free space was not stored in the file system but calculated when you first issued a dir-command and then cached in RAM. With larger drives, and on slow CPUs, that took seconds, so the free space value was stored in the FAT starting with DOS 6. Scandisk compares this stored value with the calculated one, which quite often don't match. This is just a cosmetic flaw and not critical in any way.
wrote:Best utility is Norton Disk Doctor and better get it from Norton Utilities 2001 (v.5.0) last one to include Doctor, Unformat, Unerase, Diskedit.
I remember that one of the latest DOS versions of Norton Disk Doctor was very slow (slower than Scandisk, while unbugged NDD was much faster than Scandisk).
