China DOS Union

My disk was previously partitioned with 98se's fdisk, and of course also formatted with 98se's format. Lately the machine has been hanging frequently, and I'm still looking for the cause. To reinstall the system, I booted with wengier's boot disk and did format c, then installed windows2000 on the hard disk. It said it couldn't find some kind of information; I didn't understand it clearly. I've never run into that before. During format it reported the hard disk as about 5G, but dir showed about 4G. Don't know why, so I had to boot with a 98se disk and reformat. Then both the display and dir showed 5G, and 2000 could also be installed.

Could it be that wengier's format is incompatible with 98se's fdisk? Or did I do something wrong in the process?

I haven't used format now either, but the format in wengier's msdos71 boot disk seems to be FreeDOS's.

No, the FORMAT in the MS-DOS 7.10 boot disk I made is exactly the MS one (from 98SE), untouched. And I've used my MS-DOS 7.10 boot disk to install Win2K on a classmate's computer without any problem at all.

Those fdisk and format in wengier's disk are genuine MS stuff. They haven't been modified. I'd also like to replace them with third-party software, but wengier still kept them. Still, in a short time it's hard to find tools with better compatibility, expanded functions, and small size too.

For xCOPY and HIMEM I would choose third-party software.

The third-party software in my boot disk that I use to replace MS-DOS built-in commands includes XCOPY、ATTRIB、DOSKEY、SPFDISK、DELTREE、DOSVER、CCD、XDEL 、XMSDSK, etc. They are all much easier to use functionally than the ones built into MS-DOS. For the others I only keep external commands such as FORMAT、SCANDISK、MEM, and SYS.

Also SUBST, SORT, and so on, right! My boot disk now has both Free FDISK and SPFDISK.

I formatted it twice, and both times the displayed result and the dir result were inconsistent. After booting with the pwin98se boot disk, I found there was a file there (forgot the name). Maybe my crappy motherboard (the name on the motherboard box doesn't even match the manual, and the manufacturer can't be found online) is incompatible with some program loaded by wengier's disk, causing even format to behave abnormally.

MS's subst is too big!!
I replaced it with subst from PTS-DOS 2000

Right, the SUBST, SORT, and FIND commands in my MS-DOS 7.10 boot disk were all taken from PTS-DOS.

Yeah, the original one in 981 is no longer practical. There is one in xp, but unfortunately it seems it can't be used under dos71. Anyone interested can give it a try.

Today I finally figured out the reason why the machine was hanging so often. That crappy box of mine can't properly coordinate two memory sticks, one pc133 and one pc100. No choice, had to remove one of them.

I checked, and format really has no problem. That makes it even more confusing, and I don't want to dig into it anymore.

In the April 20 version of msd710, I saw this in autoexec.bat:
LH CTMOUSE
LH CTMOUSE>NUL

A typo by wengier, right? It won't cause an error, but obviously it's...

The following is quoted from phantom at 2003-4-29 23:36:59:
In the April 20 version of msd710, I saw this in autoexec.bat:
LH CTMOUSE
LH CTMOUSE>NUL

A typo by wengier, right? It won't cause an error, but obviously it's...

That wasn't my typo! I deliberately made it like that after researching it. Because CuteMouse seems to have a BUG in batch files on a very small number of systems when loading a COM mouse: the first time it can't load correctly, and only the second time works, so I configured it this way.

Looks like there's no fault to find with wengier after all.

Yeah, judging purely from those two commands, they are repeated; the only difference is that the latter doesn't display the process.
wengier can simply be described as obsessively dedicated.