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MS-DOS 6.x


Information on running New Deal software under MS­DOS 6.x.

New Deal software is fully compatible with MS-DOS 6.x.

Doublespace

There are no documented incompatibilities between New Deal software and Doublespace disk compression. However, a few customers have reported difficulties accessing floppy disks when Doublespace is loaded. Until we find the cause and solution, \if you have trouble accessing your floppy drives while Doublespace is loaded, we recommend not using Doublespace.

You can run New Deal software from a compressed drive. However, you may notice that New Deal 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 New Deal swap file to an uncompressed drive.

There is a simple way to make New Deal write its swap file to your uncompressed host drive. Launch Preferences and click on the NewDOS 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 New Deal 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 New Deal, 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 New Deal

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 New Deal. 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 New Deal 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

New Deal 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 New Deal, 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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