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Can't create a permanent swap file in WFW 3.11

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First post, by fronzel

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Sorry if it's a big off topic, but I'm just puzzling a bit with WFW 3.11 on my beloved Omnibook 425.

Finally a 486 with monochrome VGA display that runs on AA-Batteries.

After a bit of fumbling i managed to get rid of all doublespace crap, i prefer my 256 MB PCMCIA Flash card as drive C: to be uncompressed.

However for better performance i obviously wanna use 32-Bit File access and 32-bit drive access.

To my surprise both options are greyed out so i read a bit about it and - of course you need ifshlp.sys loaded in config.sys and make a PERMANENT swap file.

adding ifshlp was no magic, but the swap file is being persistent. Its set to temporary and whenever i try to set it to "PERMANENT" or "NONE" windows flips and is like "No way". The descriptive error message reads just "Unable to create permanent swap file" which wasnt so helpful.

Any tricks about this? Or is it a limitation that flash disks can not be used for permanent swap files? I have found some reading about 32-Bit file access and 32-bit drive access and it seems it may only work for physical harddrives, not for flash versions. Still i don't get why the swap file cant be permanent. I hope it's just something simple and someone can enlighten me, would be cool if i get this working.

Reply 1 of 4, by Dominus

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you need the driver for your hard drive. Without that no 32bit and no swap file. I think Dosfreak posted a very good article about that not too long ago, either here in Millyways or on irc.

Windows 3.1x guide for DOSBox
60 seconds guide to DOSBox
DOSBox SVN snapshot for macOS (10.4-11.x ppc/intel 32/64bit) notarized for gatekeeper

Reply 2 of 4, by Markk

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I remember Omnibook 300, a 386sx which ran on batteries, too. I think it used a 10mb read only flash drive which came with dos and windows pre-installed. You couldn't write anything on it. And it had a second normal drive where you could store data. Is it like that maybe?

Reply 4 of 4, by fronzel

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Markk wrote:

I remember Omnibook 300, a 386sx which ran on batteries, too. I think it used a 10mb read only flash drive which came with dos and windows pre-installed. You couldn't write anything on it. And it had a second normal drive where you could store data. Is it like that maybe?

Yeah actually it's exactly that, just that the OB425 came with a 486 instead of a 386.

Okay, thanks for the tips everyone. I have been able to activate 32-Bit Disk access, but 32-Bit File access still fails as i cant create a permanent swap file.

Is there any trick to create one manually? When i try to do it in control panel i just get the message "A permanent swap file cannot be created.".

Are there any limitations for creating a permanent swap file?

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