I tried installing three different type of dos last night on three different primary partitions of the hard drive, using partition magic 3.05. Then installing. When i did the last one (6.22), i got an error message, it said something like The line A20 could not be connected, and the xms driver could not be installed. It continued... Himem.sys could not be loaded because the xms driver has not been installed EMM386 could not be loaded because himem.sys was not loaded Smartdrv could not be installed because there no memory in the upper area (or something like this). I couldn't understand it. AS far as i know, i have never seen any kind of xms driver in config.sys or in the dos directory. I was able to install dos properly, before i partitioned it. There is plenty of hard disk space. The extended memory is 3072K is a little small, but it was never aproblem before. I think, dos when it installed, may have unhid other partitions, because i had to hide them again, but this should have nothing to do with any xms driver, which i have never seen or know nothing about. Any help would be gratefully received

I can shed a little light on the problem. Himem.sys IS the XMS driver. Thus the basic problem was that the way you booted did not load Himem.sys or Emm386.exe.

This is in answer to your email as to what the A20 line is. I answer here to be corrected if I am wrong. I believe the A20 line is a hole in memory at 16 Megabytes in older computers. (The first thing to check is whether there is a setting in the BIOS for line A20 that can be changed) The same way early computers can only address 1 megabyte of memory ISA slots create a problem addressing more than 16 Megabytes of memory. This is usually a problem in ISA adapter boards that use Direct Memory Access. Anyway, the A20 line is the way this glitch at 16 Megabytes was corrected. I have no idea what this has to do with using Partition Magic on a modern computer using PCI slots and Dimm memory chips. It may well be one of those error messages that misleads. Your problem requires you to get HIMEM.SYS to load--or if you are using DR-DOS EMM386.exe can stand alone sometimes--so you can load things into extended memory. Possibly your set up won't work or maybe a different version of HIMEM.SYS would load using SETVER if necessary. It is the SETUP.exe program in DOS 6.22 that has to have HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.exe installed to function? Setver might be a poor suggestion if so. I have seen a file, WINA20.386, in Windows 3.1 installations. I just supposed they were addressing line A20 because windows had a problem. And this may be unrelated. As I said, I don't know of a solution, but every little bit of information could help.