by arete » Mon Mar 20, 2017 10:15 am
Finally success...or so I think...and I'm sure this won't apply to most of you because how specific your own implementation may be...but I'm writing this just in case it does.
Can't precisely say what fixed it for me, though I have a general idea.
So my task was to get USB working on a machine running FreeDOS so I could copy and transfer files to this machine without having to deal with either floppys nor CDs. The version (1.1) of FreeDOS that I installed was from a CD image, and it gave me the following boot options: (excerpt from my fdconfig.sys)
> MENU 1 - Load FreeDOS with JEMMEX, no EMS (most UMBs), max RAM free
> MENU 2 - Load FreeDOS with EMM386 (Expanded Memory) and SHARE loaded
> MENU 3 - Load FreeDOS including XMGR XMS-memory driver
123?DOS=HIGH
12?DOS=UMB
12?DOSDATA=UMB
1?DEVICE=C:\FDOS\BIN\JEMMEX.EXE NOEMS X=TEST I=TEST NOVME NOINVLPG
2?DEVICE=C:\FDOS\BIN\HIMEMX.EXE
2?DEVICE=C:\FDOS\BIN\JEMM386.EXE X=TEST I=TEST I=B000-B7FF NOVME NOINVLPG
3?DEVICE=C:\FDOS\BIN\XMGR.SYS
3?SHELL=C:\FDOS\bin\4dos.com C:\FDOS\bin /E:1024 /P:C:\FDOS\FDAUTO.BAT
12?SHELLHIGH=C:\FDOS\BIN\COMMAND.COM C:\FDOS\BIN /E:1024 /P=C:\FDOS\FDAUTO.BAT
If I pick menu option 1 or 2 above, and then run:
USBUHCI /DisableLegacy /DisableOther
USBDRIVE /X:4
It did not matter whether I had a /X flag or one with any value 2 or above.
Both drivers load successfully (can never seem to load them in upper memory even with the flag settings). If I now attempt to copy files from my USB drive using copy or xcopy, I consistently get the following failure.
"USB dos error reading from drive E: dos area: general failure"
If I select Menu 3 followed by running USBUHCI and USBDRIVE as above, the copy and xcopy succeeds without any issue even with a greater value in the /X flag as below:
USBUHCI /DisableLegacy /DisableOther
USBDRIVE /X:64
Further with menu option 3, any file that has a "Read Only" attribute set, fails to copy from the USB drive and I get the standard (Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail) error msg.
So success or failure seems to be related to both choice of memory manager and shell as they are different based on the Menu options presented by my FreeDOS install.
The files seem to copy over consistently with Menu Option 3 which uses XMGR and 4DOS, though I'd like to understand the incompatibility with JEMMEX, HIMEMX, and JEMM386.
My PC is Dell based Pentium III 600MHz with 768MB of RAM.