A few disk bugs?

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Kernel86
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A few disk bugs?

Post by Kernel86 »

I've been playing with PCem v13.1 quite a bit over the past couple weeks and have installed a variety of oses and I've noticed a couple bugs with disks.

The first one is that 1.2MB images does seem to work at all, either booting a version of DOS from one or trying to install software.

Another is that the emulator sometimes writes beyond the end of a disk image, enlarging it to whatever size it thinks it is, and slows to a crawl while doing it. This happened twice installing different versions (I think) of OS/2, where it had the default 251MB sized hard disk image and it ended up being about 478MB when I stopped it the first time. I can't say what specifically caused this but the emulator shouldn't exceed the size of the image. I also had this happen with floppy image where the NT 3.1 setup turned a 360K image into a 720K one. That one might be easily reproducible, as I mounted the 360K image by accident.

The last thing I've run into only appears to happen on UNIX as I haven't noticed it on DOS or Windows or OS/2 even. I was able to install AT&T UNIX SVR4 2.1 and Interactive UNIX 386 SVR3.2 4.1 without issue but multiple times during install they both showed the same error indicating that the disk has been removed and to reinsert it. They seemed to recover automatically as it didn't requite any interaction and they resumed and installed without error. However the same thing is happening for most versions of SCO Xenix I've tried and in that case it's extracting it's files from a tar and restarts each time, after about 3 tries it gives up and dies.

Just thought I'd share the problems I've run into. I've really been loving the emulator so far, the choice of machines and various quirks with each of them almost makes it seem real. :)

--Kernel86
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omarsis81
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Re: A few disk bugs?

Post by omarsis81 »

Kernel86 wrote:The first one is that 1.2MB images does seem to work at all, either booting a version of DOS from one or trying to install software.
-Kernel86
I take you meant "it does NOT seem to work at all"?
Well, I installed MS-DOS from 1.2MB disks and many games and works fine.
There is some bugs with floppies however, mainly with lower density drives
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Kernel86
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Re: A few disk bugs?

Post by Kernel86 »

I've tried a variety of different machines and different drive types in the emulator at matching them in the machine bios, but PCem won't read any 1.2MB disk image I have. I can convert them or pad them out to 1.44MB and use them, in some cases, but that's a bit annoying. Examples are MS-DOS 5.0, Windows 3.0, AutoCad R10/12, some other random stuff I tried. If I'm trying to boot the disk in the case of an OS it just acts as if there's no disk inserted and trying to read a disk from DOS it just gives read errors. Haven't had a problem with disks of any other size.
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leilei
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Re: A few disk bugs?

Post by leilei »

I don't have any issues with my 1.2mb floppy dumps. Just make sure you have the correct floppy drive configured for the desired disk type in both machine and BIOS.
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