We ran out of time on this, and the oakcdrom.sys worked for us (and had a
good track record of working), Our memory was being used by NTFSDOS, which
we needed to use, and can't be unloaded, I'm guessing where that's the
missing chunk has gone.
RDisk worked very well and allowed us to specify a specific drive letter,
which simplified things for us.
The FreeCOM problem we had with enviroment variables, was when we were
trying to find the drive letter of our ramdrive using findtdsk.exe, put the
result in an environment variable called %RAMDRIVE% and then trying to read
this variable back in our Watcom app using getvar(). Once we ad a fixed
drive letter from RDisk, we didn't need that bit, so the problem went away
for us.
Anyway, thanks for the help, we managed to get things working, and have
migrated to the latest version of FreeDOS and Ghost, which fixed all our
problems.
Regards
Mark.
On 9 March 2012 17:32, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote:
>
> Hi Mark,
>
> strange that you only 470k free...
>
> > Problem is, now the ghost process is crashing with a read error from the
> > DVD, which I know don't contain any errors. Could this be related to me
> > using UIDE.SYS rather than our previous driver (oakcdrom.sys)?
>
> Oakcdrom sounds very outdated and might also use more RAM than UIDE...
> Just for comparison, you could also try the old xcdrom and gcdrom, but
> UIDE is almost always better. I also think that you only want to use
> the CD-R or CD-RW from which you booted. The it is usually easier and
> more reliable to use the ElTorito.sys driver, which works together with
> your BIOS CD boot logics and is also a very small driver :-) How much
> data do you have on the CD that you want to access, in megabytes?
>
> > DEVICE=A:\JEMMEX.EXE
>
> Unless you really need EMS or UMB memory, HIMEMX or XMGR could be
> a more stable and sufficiently small choice. With EMM drivers, you
> have to be careful to not use UMB areas that conflict with other
> drivers, hardware or BIOS functions, as modern systems are not so
> good in always properly reporting such areas to DOS. I would not
> recommend trying to use b000-b7ff as extra UMB area, by the way.
>
> The NOEMS option of EMM drivers has a misleading name: It disables
> the EMS 3 page frame, possibly freeing 64kB of UMB, but EMS itself
> stays active for EMS 4 compatible apps which need no page frames.
> My personal experience is that very few apps do need EMS at all...
>
> > SHELL=A:\COMMAND.COM A:\ /E:512 /P
> > DOS=HIGH,UMB
> > DOSDATA=UMB
>
> Without UMB driver, you would only use DOS=HIGH, but that already
> saves a lot of low DOS RAM, because kernel and command.com can go
> into HMA and XMS respectively with much of their data.
>
> > FILES=20
> > BUFFERS=4
> > LASTDRIVE=Z
>
> You might also try STACKS=0,0 although that could reduce
> stability on some systems.
>
> > DEVLOAD /H A:\UIDE.SYS /S511 /D:CDROM1 /H
>
> Because UIDE is a device driver, you better load it in
> config.sys already. Unless you are sure that your UMBs
> are stable, better do not load it high into UMBs here.
> You can use DEVICE there (or DEVICEHIGH for UMB, which
> might be less stable depending on hard- and firmware).
>
> > LH A:\RDISK.COM /S10 /:Y
>
> You could also try SHSURDRV instead, of course.
>
> > A:\FREEDOS\SHSUCDX /QQ /D:CDROM1,Z
>
> Of course /qq also makes debugging harder. I would
> suggest to use the /C option to make SHSUCDX load in
> the area that you select (low or, with LH, high) as
> opposed to picking an area itself. You could try the
> syntax /D:CDROM1,Z,,1 to say that only 1 unit is to
> be used from the selected CDROM1 driver as you have
> no drive letters left after Z: anyway. May save RAM.
> Similarily, I would recommend a /D:0 option to not
> reserve the default 8 extra drive tables in memory.
> You can use option /V to see memory stats at init.
>
> It is not really clear to me why you only have 470k
> free with so few drivers loaded, can you do e.g.
> MEM /C /D > somelog.txt and paste the output from
> that log on this list?
>
> Apart from findtdsk, there are also other tools to
> find disks by volume label. For example I return a
> drive letter by errorlevel in one of them, so you
> do not need environment variables.
>
> Which other variables does your app gather and put
> into the environment or into a batch file that is
> later used to update the environment? Can you give
> more details about in which way this goes wrong in
> FreeCOM 0.83 and 0.84 while okay in classic 0.82?
>
> Thanks! Regards, Eric
>
>
>
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