CompuServe Messages

Larry, Yes, some drives take quite a while to respond on a cold boot. If you're autobooting…there's really no way to slow things down. If you're using Binddrivers, you could add a wait of about 10 seconds prior to the binddrivers command and see if that helps. The disk isn't susceptible to software problems…the software itself is written wrong, so that it's causing a lockup. For example, a software program could change the contents of a disk buffer before it's written out to disk…thus invalidating the data…and possibly invalidating the disk drive. If you directory utility has problems with long pathnames, it sounds like it has a fixed size buffer for a pathname, and the pathname you're giving it is long than that fixed buffer. If the computer is told to write 300 bytes to a buffer (or array if you prefer) that's only 200 bytes long…it'll gladly do it…and overwrite whatever is in that next 100 bytes in memory. If that next 100 bytes is program code…suddenly your program code is changed into junk…and the computer crashes. If that next 100 bytes is part of some other program in memory…that program may crash, or become corrupted. Don