Harry Potter wrote on 2023-05-20, 15:25:
Apparently, to run most DOS programs, I have to switch to DOS mode. My MSDOS.SYS file has the DOS DriveSpace drivers disabled. If I boot to DOS mode, how do I temporarily enable these drivers without editing the file twice every time I boot to DOS mode?
I don't know much about DriveSpace and I'm a bit confused as to why it can be controlled from MSDOS.SYS but you can also apparently install the driver from CONFIG.SYS (or at least I found some DEVICEHIGH= line in some documentation for Windows 98). If you can get it working via CONFIG.SYS without it being in MSDOS.SYS (maybe this is more likely to work since your boot drive isn't compressed), then I suppose you could:
- set up a CONFIG.SYS menu, where one of the options includes a DEVICE[HIGH]= line for DriveSpace and one doesn't; and/or
- set up a shortcut in Windows which is configured to start in MS-DOS mode and which has such a DEVICE[HIGH]= line in the shortcut's CONFIG.SYS.
Maybe the second option is a better way to start out just to make sure that loading it via a CONFIG.SYS works without actually editing the actual CONFIG.SYS, but the menu option might be nicer so you can get into DOS mode with or without DriveSpace without having to boot into Windows first.
Harry Potter wrote on 2023-05-21, 00:19:
I have many floppies and Zip disks from an old Win98SE minitower whose hard drive was worth only 2.1GB formatted. It was actually a 20GB hard drive, but only the first 11% was usable: while formatting, the rest of the drive was nothing but bad sectors. 🙁
I wonder if it wasn't that the drive was bad beyond that point, but that the BIOS didn't support drives larger than that or something? I'm not sure that that is a typical BIOS capacity threshold though (I think they're 504MiB and about 7.8GiB but I'm not exactly sure).
Besides that, I like floppies. I also like Zip disks and flash drives.
Is it like people say about vinyl records, that part of the appeal is the "ceremony" of getting them out and putting them on the turntable, even though everything might be instantly available digitally? I only use floppies with my old machines because I'm too lazy to have set up networking clients and/or network booting, but using floppies does bring me some nostalgia too!