CompuServe Messages

Nancy, I haven't tried installed DOS 6 on my BB (it's only an A2088 anyway, so no big deal), but have installed it on my NCR laptop. I would strongly suspect you don't need to change setup at all, that you should have left it just as it was before you installed DOS 6. The pysical drive type is still the same..same physical parameters. DoubleSpace doesn't change any of that…including the physical capacity of the drive. What it does is compress before it stores onto the drive, and decompress as it reads from the drive. Quite similar to the way LHARC, ZIP, ARC, etc. files work. All of the data is there, just compressed to fit into a smaller space. So, during bootup, the BIOS ROM has to know what kind of drive is out there, in order to figure out how to read the partition and boot code from the drive. That information is not compressed. Under DOS 6, the boot code looks for the file DBLSPACE.BIN (also not compressed) and if it finds it…loads it. DBLSPACE.BIN then looks for compressed drives, if there, it reads the DBLSPACE.INI file (also not compressed) and mounts drives it finds there and re-arranges drive letters internally (thus..presuming you have a standard setup…renames your real C: drive to H: and then points all calls to C: to the dblspace software and CVF. In other words…for bootup, the system has to know what type of drive is really out there..not what it will eventually become. Try this…(presuming it did the normal thing and created an H: drive) go to the H: drive and type DIR /A and you'll see those uncompressed files it needs for bootup and you'll see the DBLSPACE.000 file which is what you're really working with when you address your compressed C: drive. Don