Hi all, (this will get a longer story, sorry) I inherited a FoxPro/DOS application, which is in use in about 120 delivery trucks. They have a HP 1510 Thinclient with monitor, USB-keyboard and LPT-printer strapped on the passenger seat, powered by a 12V to 230V inverter.
The app itself was first on a 256Mb CompactFlash Card, which was attached with a USB cardreader to that PC. The software booted from that Flashcards with a regular MSDOS6, no USB drivers etc necessary, seems all is handled by BIOS. I then changed those Flashcards to real USBSticks and formatted them with RUFUS and FreeDOS (Kernel 2043), recompiled their App and now some "funny" things happen (which they say never happened with the old system) a) They now have often lost clusters, which a chkdsk can repair, but it also can damage the DBFs with their data. b) Some USBSticks get completely wiped out, i.e. they loose their whole filesystem. I tracked those effects down to misbehaviour: they don't shut down the app, and when they restart the engine, the 12V will get powered off for a short time, thus the PC just crashes and reboots. But it's difficult to change that habits. I already rewrote the app so that it opens any data as short as possible and closes all files immediately, but stil there seems to be some caching involved. The config/autoexec currently have no USB-related drivers loaded. Is there anything to tweak in this situation? I already added FDAPM FLUSH at the end of the app bat, but that didn't made any difference. I have attached both files to the end of this mail. *************** Regarding the USB-Sticks: I first used 2Gb sticks (to be in FAT16 mode) but those were easily bent and cracked, now I'm using very stable full metal ones, but those are 16Gb minimum, thus FAT32. I tried to put the 2Gb ISO on those 16gb sticks with Rufus, but that thingy just expands the partition to full size. Unfortunately that DOSFSCK takes forever on a 16Gb partition, thus I would like to have only a maybe 256 or 512MB partition (I really need only 30MB for the app and data). Does anyone know a tool to format and partition an USBStick bootable and transfer the files onto it without changing the partitionsize? (Windows tool preferred, because I must remote connect with Teamviewer into those subsidiaries). RUFUS is singled out because it doesn't respect the partition size. Maybe I should setup a DOSBOXX and partition, format and make bootable with separate Freedos steps? (Some command help for that would be appreciated, since those DOS days are prone to some Alzheimer attacks :=) But a Windows One-step tool to partition and transfer the iso would be way more convenient. *************** Please take a look at the attached config.sys: that FoxPro app would need 4Mb XMS memory, is that jemmex call correct for that? Or should I use a different syntax? *************** Next problem: I tried to get printer support via USB (currently they use classic LPT, but those printers get very rare). But as soon as I load the basic USBUHCI driver, the USB-stick is no more available, due to reinitialization of the hardware, it seems. Is there a way to keep the USBdrive as C: available and get printer support? Just loading USBPRINT (from Bret Johnson) doesn't get a connection to the printer. *************** A more cosmetic problem: Is there any way to suppress that whole bunch of startup output, especially that "Press F8 to trace " etc ? Thanks for any pointers! wOOdy from Bavaria, Germany *************** Config.sys: set lang=DE set dosdir=\Freedos device = \freedos\jemmEx.exe PGE maxext=4096 noems country = 049,850 \freedos\country.sys files = 100 buffers = 20 *************** Autoexec.bat: @echo off set Drive=%DosDir%\.. set Path=%dosdir%;%Drive%\Fox; set Temp=%Drive%\temp set FoxProCFG=%Drive%\fox\config.fp set FoxProSWX=+x -t set DirCMD=/P /ONG /4 fdapm apmdos display con=(ega,437,1) mode con codepage prepare=((437) %DosDir%\ega.cpx) mode con codepage select=437 keyb gr,437,%DosDir%\keyboard.sys cls rem start the app hbw.bat _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
