NewDeal Technical Support Document 245

NEWDEAL AND MS-DOS

Information on running NewDeal software under MS­DOS

NewDeal software is fully compatible with MS-DOS 3.3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

Doublespace

There are no documented incompatibilities between NewDeal software and Doublespace disk compression. However, a few customers have reported difficulties accessing floppy disks when Doublespace is loaded. If you have trouble accessing your floppy drives while Doublespace is loaded, we recommend not using Doublespace.

You can run NewDeal software from a compressed drive. However, you may notice that NewDeal runs slowly. Doublespace causes all programs to read and write to the disk about 25% slower. You can recover some performance loss by directing the NewDeal swap file to an uncompressed drive.

There is a simple way to make NewDeal write its swap file to your uncompressed host drive. Launch Preferences and click on the NewDeal, (or NewDOS or Geos) button. Change the section that reads:

Path C:\NEWDEAL\PRIVDATA\SWAP
to
Path H:\SWAP
If your uncompressed drive is a drive other than H:, replace the H with the correct drive letter.

Performance

If you have NewDeal installed in a DoubleSpace partition and have noticed a slight slowdown in performance, here is a tip that should help. Users who have had no problems can also use this tip for even faster operation.

NOTE: You must be running a 386 or higher CPU.

  1. At the DOS prompt, change to the root directory of your boot drive and type the following command
    C:\DOS\ATTRIB -H -R -S DBLSPACE.INI
    to remove the Hidden, Read-Only and System attributes from the file, DBLSPACE.INI. You must have ATTRIB.EXE in your \DOS directory or in your path.
  2. Use a text editor such as EDIT.COM to modify DBLSPACE.INI and add the following line
    Enable386=1
  3. Save the file and, at the DOS prompt, enter
    C:\DOS\ATTRIB +H +R +S DBLSPACE.INI
    to restore the file attributes. Reboot your computer.

Renaming Disks: "Error FM-19 unable to rename disk."

This message is erroneous. If you exit NewDeal, then re-enter and select the floppy drive, the new name will appear. The spurious message is caused by a change in the way MS-DOS 6 reports the disk name compared to earlier versions of DOS.

The following information pertains only to MS-DOS 6.2

Drive lights flash when starting NewDeal

This is a normal process of the Doublespace feature called Automount. Automount is looking at drives A: and B: for doublespaced floppy disks. If you want to disable this feature, exit NewDeal. At a DOS prompt, enter
dblspace/Automount=0

after a few moments a message will appear: "Doublespace.ini has been modified. For this change to take effect, you must restart your computer." Reboot your machine. The next time you run your NewDeal software the drive lights will not flash. To restore the Automount function, just enter

dblspace/Automount=1
at a DOS prompt, and reboot.

Compressed Floppies

NewDeal is compatible with Doublespace compressed floppies. If you have disabled the Automount feature, you need to turn it back on (see the Drive Lights Flash section above).

If a compressed diskette is in a drive when you start NewDeal, the compressed floppy will be seen as a hard disk. The drive button will appear as a hard drive instead of a floppy, and you will also see a new drive letter added with a picture of a floppy on it. This extra button is the host drive for the compressed floppy. You cannot copy files to it, nor can it be formatted. However, you can still read and write files on both compressed and non-compressed diskettes.

Do NOT attempt to format a compressed floppy disk in NewManager. The compressed diskette is interpreted as a hard disk and trying to format it may crash the system.

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Last Modified 17 Feb 1999