VOGONS


First post, by wcwdca

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XP Pro / SP2
DOSBox 0.72
E6850@3GHz CPU
2GB RAM
500GB free disk space

Problem: I'm testing an old office management program (based on DataFLEX) - it complains and exits when it thinks there is less than 4GB free disk space available. Is there a way around this?

There is actually 500 GB free on the mounted disk. If I MOUNT with no parameters, it shows only about 110MB free on the drive (using the dir command). Using the -freesize 4000000 paramater to MOUNT, I have gotten it to recognize up to 2GB free. Using -freesize 400000000 - it only recognizes about 1GB free on the disk.

Suggestions?

Thanks,
Jay

Reply 1 of 34, by Qbix

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try this:

mount c c:\ -size 512,127,65533,65533

The readme has the exact meaning of these parameters somewhere

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Reply 2 of 34, by wcwdca

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I just tried - unfortunately it did not help. It still shows just 4GB free (4,261,217,792 to be precise).

I'll try to figure out the exact parameters for my drive and try again.

Thanks,
Jay

Reply 3 of 34, by ADDiCT

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If this is DOS software, i highly doubt it really needs 4GB - FAT16 (which was the standard FS of DOS pre-Win9x) has a maximum of 2GB per partition, AFAIK. Maybe there's another error which gets misinterpreted by the program.

Reply 4 of 34, by wcwdca

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You could be right - the error message may be misleading. No way to know for sure. The last version of this program was written against W95. The company folded and the software is unsupported...

I searched the drive for any companion error files that may be related - but no luck.

Reply 5 of 34, by wcwdca

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chkdsk reports 4096 bytes per allocation unit (cluster) (512 x 😎?, 122096000 total clusters on disk, 121859301 clusters available.

So I tried -size 512,8,122096000,121859301 (ignoring the readme which specifies a max value of 65534 for the last two parameters) with no luck. It's now reporting about 110MB free.

Reply 6 of 34, by Qbix

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with the command I posted I had 1.2 TB free when doing dir inside dosbox.
It's hard to guess how the application checks for freespace or what is wrong with it.

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Reply 7 of 34, by wcwdca

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That's very strange... I'm also checking free disk space with dir.

Reply 8 of 34, by wcwdca

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Attached a screen shot - upper window is a regular command prompt showing 499 GB free, lower window is DOSBox - you can see the mount command and the dir showing 4 GB free.

Reply 9 of 34, by Qbix

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here is mine.
it looks like the 32 bit version of dosbox is different then the 64 bit version

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Reply 10 of 34, by Davros

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ok heres your solution
create a small ramdrive run your program from it

Reply 11 of 34, by MiniMax

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I am soooo tempted to delete Davros' posting in order to spare him the embarrassment, but I think he deserves it, so I will let it be.

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Reply 12 of 34, by wcwdca

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Well, this makes no sense to me. Tried it anyway. Problem remains.

Jay

Reply 13 of 34, by Davros

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why minimax the "there is less than 4gb of hdd space" doesnt actually mean it needs that much space the program gets confused because there is too much space if he made a very small partiton (much,much smaller than 4gb) the problem would go away
when that program was released no one had 4gb of hdd space most people had 20 - 30 mb at most

ps: wcwda you installed to program to a small ramdrive 500mb or so did you also tell it to use the drive for its save/data files ?

quote from the resplendant resolver faq
"Many older applications just use a single 32 bit a value to store the total amount of free disk space. Programmers know that this means that such programs misreport on drives larger than 2 or 4GB. "

Last edited by Davros on 2008-02-22, 19:50. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 14 of 34, by wd

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if he made a very small partiton

Uhm you're aware that he's using dosbox, right? If so, you're
aware of the free size limit in dosbox, right?

Reply 15 of 34, by Davros

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well actually i wasnt aware you couldnt install software on a partition in dosbox (or run software that is installed on a partion) + i didnt know dosbox had a minimum free space limit either
wd the error is not caused by him having too little free space available but by having too much free space
looking at the screenshots those drives are far too big wcwcda's is showing 4gb free thats whats causing the error, they should be smaller only few mb in size

Last edited by Davros on 2008-02-22, 19:59. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 16 of 34, by DosFreak

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Does anyone read anymore? Are we going to have to start translating and summarizing the previous posts in a thread from now on?

Last edited by DosFreak on 2008-02-22, 20:20. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 17 of 34, by Davros

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im not with you dosfreak this is not a dosbox error its a program error
if there is too much hdd space available the program will complain that there is not enough (as strange as it may sound)

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Reply 18 of 34, by wd

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if there is too much hdd space available

The first thing the poster did was use the app with the default
dosbox settings, ie. size-limited. Please read the full thread.

Reply 19 of 34, by Davros

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i did read it
as i keep trying to tell everyone 110mb is too big he should make it even smaller less than 32mb (not sure of the exact value but iirc its around 32mb i would try 30mb just to be safe)