On the wrong bus
Wrong number
The 32-bit challenge
Manual wanted
EZ Out
Still not so EZ
No Waves
32-bit challenged again
. . . and again
Q I have an IBM PS/2 SX-55. I would like to run multimedia to get the benefits of CD-ROM. I recently bought a Sound Blaster card to try that out first. To my dismay it has a different edge connector and I cannot even plug it in.
Does this mean that the PS/2 cannot be expanded or upgraded, or is there perhaps an adaptor on the market? The local shops have no idea.
- Fred Parsonage, Waikiki, WA
A I'm sorry to hear that the local shops are so ignorant ("couldn't find their bum with both hands tied behind their back", springs to mind). The problem you've bumped into is no dark secret. The PS/2 has its own proprietary bus type, which IBM designed in a foolish attempt to lock its customers in (curiously, at about the same time, Apple decided that this was a bad policy and opened up its proprietary bus to clone makers).
The good news is that the PS/2 can indeed be expanded. The bad news is that because the PS/2 Micro Channel bus is out of the mainstream, the cards tend to be a bit more expensive and not all makers bother with a PS/2 version. However, there certainly is a Sound Blaster card for the Micro Channel bus, and if your local dealer still goes "Duuhh", ring the main distributor, Creative Pacific, on (02) 9906 8887, or IBM on (02) 9951 9334.
Q I have two questions that I hope you will be able to help me with. I bought a 386DX-25 system with 1Mb of RAM and a 40Mb hard disk two years ago. I decided to upgrade the system with more RAM and a bigger hard disk. A friend of mine lent me 8Mb of RAM to try out before I decided how much more RAM I should buy.
When I turn on the PC, I can see DOS checking memory, counting through 8Mb no problem, but as soon as the AUTOEXEC tries to load HIMEM.SYS, an error message appears, saying "Cannot enable A20 line. Extended memory not available".
I read the board manual, looking for any setting I have to make, but found nothing. I tried to enable the A20 line through the BIOS Setup but the same error occurred. I have asked other sources, but did not get any answer that makes sense. I hope you can help me.
The second problem is with printing in a network environment. I work in an office where we run Windows 3.11 on 10 computers, printing to three HP560 printers. When printing through a local port we have no problem. If we try to access the printer of one PC from another PC via the network, the first job prints OK. However, the first print job will tie up the port - the printer finishes printing, but the Print Manager Status keeps displaying that the printer is still printing and it will remain in that state forever. The only way to clear the fault is to turn off the Print Manager and turn it back on again.
- Peter Nguyen, Collingwood, Vic
A You're not saying what happened when you put the old memory back in. If everything went back to normal, you simply had the wrong memory modules. Some motherboards are even sensitive to the brand of memory chip, so you should find out from your manual what the special requirements of your machine are.
If you're still having trouble after removing the borrowed chips, there is a risk that something on your motherboard got zapped by static electricity during the installation.
With the printing problem, you don't say if you're networking through Windows for Workgroups or using some other system. If it's Windows for Workgroups, the printer server is supposed to return a message to the originating machine when the print job is finished. To do this, it uses Winpopup and the Mail mechanism. Since it seems to happen to all workstations, it wouldn't be a missing Winpopup file, but it's possible that you have corrupted or haven't installed MS Mail or one of its DLLs, and the system simply sits there sending a message and waiting for an answer.
Those are the possibilities I can think of, and the MS Mail problem is really the only one that would affect all workstations. If you're using another network operating system, such as NetWare or LANtastic, I couldn't even guess what the problem is, I'm sorry to say.
Q Knowing how much you like a challenge, I present you with our problem (and I wish I had done so a long time ago). I enjoy your section of PC World the best, as my hobby has been hardware and setting up computers to run at their best, while my wife teaches software. We purchased a new 486DX2-66 with 16Mb RAM and a 1,080Mb IBM HDD in November 1994. The HDD is partitioned into three drives to reduce slack.
We got what I considered a good deal at the time, but it did involve us setting up the computer right from scratch, including loading DOS and Windows ourselves.
The problem we have is that we never have been able to engage 32-bit disk access. In fact, for some time I could not engage 32-bit file access until I read in the Help Screen to disable IDB Block Mode in the BIOS, which worked. Both WinProbe and WinTune indicate that I should have 32-bit disk access engaged, and the motherboard and Enhanced IDE card both say it is possible. The 32-bit disk access check box is not ghosted.
If I cross the box for 32-bit disk access or edit WIN.INI manually, Windows boots with the message: "WDCTRL Validation failed at phase 07, DF", and asks me to press any key to continue without 32-bit disk access. Then, when entering Windows, the 32-bit file access is also back at 16-bit, even though the box is still checked.
I tried different settings in the BIOS, always returning to the original settings without success. What I did discover was that my BIOS had some lines missing and some others added from the lines that were in the handbook, and I argued with the vendor that I could have a faulty BIOS, or it had rewritten itself somehow, which he denied was possible. I was of the feeling that it had "adapted" itself somehow to the larger drive and partitioning, but didn't know enough to argue the point.
The missing lines indicated they were important to what I was trying to achieve, and as I later found out, a BIOS can build its own Enhanced Drive Parameter Table.
The lines missing are:
IDE LBA Mode
IDE 32 bit Transfer
Video cachable option
BIOS cachable option
The lines added were:
Non cachable area #1 size
Non cachable area #1 base (which is ghosted anyway)
Primary Master IDE LBA mode
Primary Slave IDE LBA mode.
The supplier of the computer has been helpful to a point, but I don't have any confidence in their ability to solve the problem after many telephone conversations and promises to fix it. They have maintained that it is a driver problem. They have been very good with easily solved glitches I've had, and have replaced a fan and card without hesitation, but avoid anything "too hard".
I also had conflicts with my Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM driver which they could not fix, and I am presently running on an S3 generic driver until Diamond USA reply to me through Chips & Bits (now there's a switched-on company - very attentive and helpful).
I researched 32-bit disk access as much as I could and discovered that the Windows WDCTRL is outdated for large drives, and that we should replace it with dedicated drivers for this purpose. We had an Enhanced IDE I/O card which had it's own drivers for 32-bit disk access and so I installed them to find they gave the same failed validation message.
I researched further and saw a reference to the new Western Digital WDCRV.386 Enhanced driver that is supposed to be the latest and greatest, and was able to download it from CompuServe (WIN31.EXE in the IBM Hardware forum) as well as a lot of support text files, which I studied. When this driver was loaded exactly according to instructions, Windows now hesitated with a message that I had a "Fatal error", and I could continue without 32-bit disk access. Again, 32-bit file access was turned off.
From the text files, it seemed to me that I had an outdated or incompatible BIOS. However, the BIOS is an Ami BIOS dated 25/7/95, so it seemed unlikely.
Talking to yet another independent source, I was told that the system probably was using the card BIOS, which was quicker than 32-bit disk access anyway, and that I probably had it operating at its quickest as it was "tricking" the system BIOS and still behaving as a 32-bit disk access or better. This was hard to understand, so I would appreciate your comments. I remember when drives first started to exceed 538Mb that to trick the system BIOS was the immediate method used, but since then more elegant solutions have been developed with compatible BIOS. I would very much appreciate your assistance in this matter.
- Shaughan Syme, Manly Vale, NSW
A A challenge is one thing, friend, but this is a long way beyond my ability. The best I can do is throw this open to other readers. I'm sure there will be a few out there who have not only come across the same problem, but solved it as well.
Having said that, I'm suspicious of the /D switch on your MSCDEX, which is supposed to match the value of the /D switch on your CD device driver, and may cause a cache clash (say that three times quickly).
There are also another couple of drivers I'm not familiar with. You may have tried this already, but my first step would have been to REM out everything except a bare-bones minimum system (no CD), possibly after deleting and reinstalling Windows, to see if 32-bit file and disk access would work then. If it did, your next step is obviously to reinstate one gadget after another until the trouble reappears.
On the other hand, the way the timing of this column has turned out, you may like to forget about the whole hassle and start from scratch with Windows 95. It handles disk caching in its own delightful way - well hidden from the user's prying eyes - and in fact kills 32-bit access in a Windows 3.11 dual-boot system. Windows 95 has worked beautifully on a couple of systems where I couldn't implement 32-bit access due to hardware incompatibility.
And no, a ROM can't change itself - it's physically incapable of it, which is why it's called Read-Only Memory. It can of course change the contents of buffers under its control, and if the ROM has had its contents "shadowed" into RAM for greater speed, the shadowed copy can of course change, but the changes would be lost each time you switch off.
Q I have a number of problems. The first is that I have an Award Notebook 3300A machine, without a manual, ha ha ha (it was a gift). It keeps giving me a report of a "system configuration error" at boot time. I have looked at Setup and I cannot see what is wrong (enclosed printout), being a novice. Also enclosed is a print-out of MSD. The question is what have I got to change, and how?
Next question is about the ports on the machine. It has the usual two serial and one parallel port, plus an external CRT port and an external keyboard port with a toggle switch for the latter. On connecting the CRT to an external monitor, the screen is blank. How do I get the external CRT to display?
My third question is what firm is the distributor for AWARD machines, so I can ask about getting a manual for this machine?
The fourth question is about the function keys. They do not operate under any combination of key press! In particular, the Sleep, Standby and Norm would be a great help with the battery lasting only two hours, less without the functions mentioned.
- D F Newton, Richmond, NSW
A You definitely need the manual to straighten this one out, so let's hope there is a reader out there with the same machine who can help you out with a copy of the important bits. I'm not aware of an importer for this brand, but perhaps somebody else can help out.
Your system configuration error relates to your video setup. MSD indicates that you have two different drivers set up and they don't get along.
The CRT problem has two possible causes: the computer fails to identify the monitor, which could be because it's the "wrong" brand, or because its connector isn't wired the "right" way. There is obviously a standard way to wire VGA connectors, but a number of brands (especially in the "early" days six or seven years ago) used their own pinouts with added functions (I have come across two such machines). Once you get hold of a manual, you should be able to dig deeper into this one - I expect there should be a way to tell your computer about the monitor.
The function keys are usually colour-coded and operate when a Shift key of the same colour is either pressed first or held down. I expect you would have tried this with no luck, which makes this another matter for the manual.
In the July hardware Q&A, there was a letter about an EZ utility used to set up hard disk access beyond the 545Mb limit. If it is the same utility that comes with some Seagate drives (EZ.EXE), the only way to get rid of it, apart of doing a low-level format, is to use FDISK/MBR to remove it from the partition table.
- Jari, via Internet
I have just read your columns at the back of the July issue and have some information that may be of use regarding the "Not so EZ" item (page 198). EZ is a utility supplied on all Seagate hard disks over 500Mb. From the EZ manual:
528Mb system capacity limit
Computers using DOS and some BIOS impose a 528Mb capacity limit on ATA disks. This occurs because the BIOS is designed to use up to 1,024 cylinders in the translation geometry for mapping the data surface of the drive. The drive has more than 1,024 cylinders.
The BIOS needs to be able to use LBA or ECHS addressing systems. The manual gives a full set of instructions for installing and configuring the driver. Basically, the driver intercepts the call to the BIOS table and translates it. The upside is in a 540Mb disk you get about 538Mb. The downside is that if the driver gets lost, so does all your data.
- Matt Howard, via Internet
Editor's comment: Thanks for the information, Matt. You mention the reason why I don't recommend proprietary solutions like this: they put you out on a limb. If EZ goes belly-up, so does your data. I think it's a lot safer to subdivide the disk into logical drives of less than 528Mb, which also has the advantage that there is less waste of space. As you probably know, DOS allocates space in clusters of sectors that are bigger for bigger drives (because DOS can't keep track of more than 64K clusters). So if you have files of a few bytes each on a hard disk larger than 1Gb, each rattles around in an allocated space of 32K. And since few files will happen to fill an exact number of clusters, there will be some dead space at the end of each and every file. On a 1Gb disk in one piece, 1,000 files will tot up a hair under 8Mb of wasted space. If you split the drive down the middle, you'll save 4Mb of that. Not a lot, but it could make the difference between go and no go.
Q I have a problem with a Sound Blaster 16 card in that it will not produce 8- or 16-bit digitised sound, but will produce FM synthesised music when running the Sound Blaster 16 Diagnostic Utility, DIAGNOSE.EXE.
I purchased the card as a Sound Blaster bundle including a Creative CD-ROM drive, type CR563, in August 1994, and initially installed in a clone 386DX machine with a 120Mb HDD and 4Mb of RAM.
The video was not brilliant and I could not get any sound out of the bundled Grolier Encyclopedia, (which is OK incidentally; I've tried it on another multimedia machine).
In March this year I purchased an Osborne Pentium 60 and installed the card in this machine. It improved the video output but there was the same problem with the sound - 8- or 16-bit digitised sound. I have tried 48 permutations of IRQ2, 5, 7 and 10; Low DMA of 0, 1and 3; and High DMA of "use low", 5, 6 and 7.
In desperation, I have also tried the four different audio Base I/O addresses and two MPU-401 UART Base I/O addresses, all without success.
Presently the card is set up as:
Audio Base I/O Address: 220H
MPU-401 UART Base I/O Address: 330H
Interrupt: 10
Low DMA channel: 1
High DMA channel: 5
I enclose a copy of my AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, MSD.EXE, WIN and SYSTEM.INI files.
- Chris Hakkennes, Benalla, Vic
A I can find no sign of conflict in your system files, and you've tried all possible settings. Anyway, when there's a conflict, you'll usually have some sound, though it'll be scratchy and intermittent. When there is no conflict, a sound card will fail to work for one of two reasons: the driver software or setup is faulty, or the card is faulty. I assume you took the card back to the dealer for testing under warranty early in the piece, so we can rule out a fault in the card. It would be easy to test - you only need to plug the card into a system that is already working correctly with the same model of card.
If so, that leaves a software fault. As far as I can tell from your system files, all drivers are correctly installed, and if one of the driver files were missing you'd get an error message. It's interesting to note here that all the little Windows frills are in place, which means that Windows has accepted the sound system as functional. That is, Windows has tested and found that the hardware is present and correctly installed with all drivers.
There remains a faint possibility that one of the driver files could be corrupted in a small way, such that it runs but delivers no sound, but it would really surprise me. I'd want to test that card before I did anything else, especially as the Sound Blaster diagnostic utility fails to make it play.
I'm surprised you mention video: this card has nothing to do with video playback quality, only sound. The video is in the capable hands of your #9 Trio64 VESA display adaptor.
Q I am having problems with trying to get Windows 3.11 to use 32-bit disk access. I used to have only one 340Mb Maxtor HDD, but recently added a second 540Mb Maxtor HDD. Taking this opportunity, I reinstalled all my software organising it across the two drives.
The new 540Mb Maxtor is now drive C: and I use it for the operating system and all my major applications. After selecting 32-bit disk access, Windows will not boot. Two error messages appear, seemingly randomly. "Insufficient memory or address space to initialise Windows in 386 enhanced mode", and "EMM386 error #03 in memory space 00B8:0050". As 32-bit file access works, what sort of performance gains will 32-bit disk access give? Please help me.
- Derek Trau, Miranda, NSW
AYour problems seem to be in the same basket with Shaughan Syme's in this section. There are clearly difficulties with 32-bit disk access on large drives, but 32-bit file access still works. This is because 32-bit file access is in reality a cache program (sort of like SmartDrive), while 32-bit disk access refers to a protected-mode hardware driver. If it can't be used, Windows simulates it with the so-called "real-mode mapper" RMM.D32. This is a little slower, but even in this mode, 32-bit file access will run your disks faster than SmartDrive.
Q Congratulations on having the most interesting section that I have read in any PC magazine. Your July 1995 Help Screen was particularly timely as two of your contributors raised a topic that occupied a fair amount of my time over the last week - installing a hard disk with a capacity of more than 528Mb. I have a Compucon 386DX-40 with 4Mb RAM and, originally, a Seagate 3120A 107Mb hard disk. The new disk is a Seagate ST3660A 545Mb, part number 95802-405. This is significant because this part comes with special installation software, which bypasses the BIOS drive size limitation, already loaded.
Stephen Heusz of Killingworth apparently went through a very similar exercise, except that I chose not to partition my disk, and he obviously came to the same decision point as I did with the DOS Setup disk. I use DOS 5.0, but the behaviour seems to be the same. The Seagate hard disk manual is not clear on what you do next, so here our paths diverged, and I selected the option which expands the DOS files onto floppies (four, in my case), created a C:\DOS subdirectory, and copied all the expanded files to this subdirectory. This worked perfectly, somewhat to my surprise!
This is also relevant to Paul Chang's problem. This incident seems to be another one worthy of your "Botched Installation by Dealers Who Should Know Better" file. According to the Seagate manual, the limitation is actually the BIOS, which cannot handle more than 1,024 cylinders. The EZ Drive software is the installation software that came with my Seagate disk, and, as noted above, when installed properly as part of the boot sector (I assume that is where it goes), it bypasses the BIOS limitation during bootup. One point here: the Seagate manual specifically states that its version of EZ is tailored for the Seagate drive and will not work with any other. For interest, I also lost about 4K of conventional memory (the manual warns of this), but after fiddling with the system I now have a Largest Executable Program Size of 608.5K, and could probably do better if I tried.
Some other points. SmartDrive double buffering is automatically installed during the Windows 3.1 setup if SmartDrive cannot determine that it is not necessary. This doubt is caused by the change to the bootup system. I don't know if this applies to Windows 3.11, or indeed if the double buffering is necessary with my installation. I am using it, just in case.
The Seagate hard disk manual contains specific instructions on how to remove the EZ Drive boot information. It seems that Paul Chang's dealer botched not only the installation but also the fixing of it. The manual also contains specific instructions on how to use FDISK to change the partitioning after the EZ Drive software is installed. The manual notes that the drive size limitation can also be solved by using a different disk controller, or upgraded BIOS.
Finally, Dave Kelly asks for a good text on Windows. On a recent trip to the US I picked up a copy of The Windows 3.1 Bible by Fred Davis (Peachpit Press, 2414 Sixth St, Berkeley, California), which came with a CD of the book plus lots of interesting utilities, etc. To someone of my neophytical status this book is marvellous.
- Nigel Spurling, via Bungendore, NSW
Editor's comment: Well done, Nigel. We're getting EZ pretty well pinned down. And you know what - I'm so glad Windows 95 will make all this disk size nonsense a thing of the past.