After a month of testing, I feel confident that the cause of the "Free disk space reported incorrectly" problem has now been correctly identified. It is very simple, and involves the DOS Navigator file manager by RIT Labs. My version is 1.51.
To avoid the problem, it is enough to stop using Navigator's "Direct disk access" feature, which can be turned on or off in the menu "Options, Configuration, System setup". Switching "Direct Access" off is no big loss. It just disables a couple of Navigator's features such as Disk Editor and Reanimator. However, for months I missed an important point about the way the pertinent menu works. In order to disable Direct Access, one must do it separately for each disk drive. Successively click on each drive letter, and then click on Direct Access to disable it. Before I realized that, I thought Direct Access was off for all disks but in fact it was still on for disk A -- which is why the problem persisted in floppies, and I kept asking questions to the User Mailing List and to Eric. Sorry about that. After correctly disabling it for all disks, the free space was never incorrectly reported again. There is another aspect to this. In my first months of FreeDOS I had several crashes, some of them with severe loss of files, which had to be recovered from backups. Besides, crashes were not associated with any particular software or situation: they seemed to be random. At that time I was still (unknowingly) using Navigator's Direct Disk Access for hard and floppy disks. After disabling it for disk C, no more crashes with loss of files occurred -- in fact, almost no crashes at all. Thus, I presume that Navigator's Direct Disk Access under FreeDOS can cause a lot more damage than just incorrect free disk space reporting. I also want to correct and apologize for something I said previously: that Necromancer's Navigator was crash-prone. That was only when I was still using RIT Navigator's Direct Access; now it is very stable. By the way, Necromancer's Navigator also has the Direct Disk Access feature, but I was not brave enough to test it :-) Apparently the conclusion is simple: just do not use Navigator's Direct Disk Access with FreeDOS. Marcos Florence Sao Paulo, Brazil ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
