China DOS Union

Previously, for some reason, I had been using grub for dos 0.4.2 (01/07/2007). Recently, I saw that version 0.4.3 was officially released, so I updated it.

The C drive was formatted as NTFS with XP SP2, and after installing Windows, I used boot.ini to load grldr, then used map --mem to boot a gz-compressed 2.88M floppy disk image file.

Now I found that just after installing the system (that is, when there are many file fragments on the C drive), g4d starts normally, and there are no errors when loading the floppy disk image, but it often has errors when booting the image file. The most common one is that Ghost 8.2 cannot run, and it prompts a bunch of register information; once, when booting a certain image file, it reported that command.com was not found, but booting another image file with similar content could succeed.

When encountering these problems, as long as I use the "Disk Defragmenter" that comes with Windows to defragment the C drive and then restart to enter grub for booting, the problem can be solved. Or reverting to the above-mentioned old version of g4d can also solve the problem.

I have tested version 0.4.3 official version and the versions downloaded from grub4dos.jot.com on 10/25/2007 and 10/26/2007, and all three have the same problem. I initially suspect that there is a problem with the code for reading NTFS in the new version. When the file is not stored continuously, the read data is incorrect.

In addition, let's mention the problem of the g4d menu shortcut keys. The current menu shortcut keys define the first item as 0 and the second item as 1. From the programmer's perspective, this is very correct, and we users can gradually get used to it. But if I teach others how to use the menu, I have to tell them "you select the first item of the menu, or press the shortcut key 0", or "you select the 6th item, or press the number key 5", which is very awkward and not in line with user habits.

Can the development team consider arranging the shortcut keys starting from 1 again, to be consistent with the order of the number keypad on the keyboard?

[ Last edited by Sense on 2007-11-4 at 08:35 PM ]

When you teach others, just leave out the words after "or", heh heh.

For these users, telling them more methods won't help much. One is enough.

A very small issue, just leave it.

The original developers of GRUB like to count from 0 like in the C language. People who like the BASIC language find this inconvenient.

But this has become a standard, and changing it would only add confusion. So, I don't advocate changing these aspects. Also, I won't add an option that allows users to adjust the "menu item base," because that would still cause confusion, and end users facing different interpretations of menu numbers across different GRUB4DOS versions is also not good. We shouldn't create our own troubles.

Regarding the issue of accessing files on NTFS partitions, we will pay attention to it. bean is mainly responsible for related issues in this area.

Please use fstest.exe for testing. Assume the problematic file is C:\aa.img, run the following commands:

fstest info C:\
fstest list C:\
fstest comp C:\aa.img
fstest inode C:\aa.img

fstest.exe runs in the Win32 environment. Download URL:

http://grub4dos.sourceforge.net/grub4dos/

The test is done. The detailed situation has been posted on the Sysoft Shikong Forum. To save resources, it won't be transferred here. The test result is that the problem exists in versions from 2007-06-06 and later.