MS-DOS 5 installer refusing hard disk with "less than 3 disk sectors per cluster" \ VOGONS

MS-DOS 5 installer refusing hard disk with "less than 3 disk sectors per cluster"

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First post, by mxmxmx2

mxmxmx2 Offline

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Rank: Newbie
Posts: 19
Joined: 2018-07-27, 17:52

If you try to install MS-DOS 5 to a hard disk drive where the file system has two sectors per cluster, you get an error message:

The attachment guest os_001.png is no longer available

(The screenshot is from DOSBox, but I encountered this on real hardware first.)

It is an oddly worded message: Sectors per cluster must be a power of two. Hence, what it really wants to say is: the file system needs to have 4 sectors per cluster or more. Note that MS-DOS itself can read the hard disk without problems, it's just the installer that complains.

Not wanting to reformat my C: drive, I patched the check out of the installer. The installation went without issues, and the now installed MS-DOS 5 works as well.

But surely, the error message must be there for a reason. Does someone know? Neither the MS-DOS manual nor an Internet search yielded any clues.

Reply 1 of 1, by igully

Posted on Yesterday, 21:53

igully Offline

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Rank: Newbie
Posts: 61
Joined: 2024-09-07, 19:26

My quick guess is that it is down to how the boot loading mechanism expects the kernel to be placed (IO.SYS).
Also, I seem to remember that there was a dreadful bug in the CHKDSK command in MS-DOS 5.0.

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