I installed Wengier's Dos7.10 (no win98GUI)on my very old Quantum TRB850A C drive (AMI bios dated 04-04-93) with Ontrack V9.52 DDO as primary hd and my other secondary D drive, a Conner CFS model 420mb with dos 6.22 and Win3.11. I keep getting corrupt swap file and file allocation table bad messages. I would like to use my C drive for Dos7.10/Win98se GUI and my D drive for Dos6.22/Win3.11 or Wfwg 3.11. Please help me to solve those errors.

Kaos, Two days before, I have already added the following Technote 3 after you asked that question with almost the same title in Win3.1 Forum. "Technote 3: MS-DOS 7.x supports LFNs natively, but in order to protect LFNs from being damaged by certain old DOS tools (especially some older disk tools like DOS6 SCANDISK) which directly access (write) to the disk but without LFN support, two new commands, LOCK and UNLOCK, were introduced to MS-DOS 7.x. These two commands are new but sometimes very useful. For more information about LOCK/UNLOCK, please type "LOCK /?" and "UNLOCK /?" under MS-DOS 7.x. The drive should be locked either manually or automatically before any program tries to write directly to the disk (that is, "direct disk write access"). Windows 3.x only calls "direct disk write access" when it's attempting to create a new permanent swap file. Unfortunately, since Windows 3.x was released before Long File Names (LFN) were introduced, it doesn't support LFN unless it's patched (as you can see in the Mini-Windows 3.11 Boot Disk below). So the problem is that it doesn't lock the drive automatically before creating a new permanent swap file. There are a couple of workarounds: just using a temporary swap file (which is the default setting of Win3.x), or manually locking (e.g. by typing "LOCK C:") the drive before Win3.x creates a new permanent swap file. The 32-bit disk/file access in WFW 3.x should work fine as well, as you can see in Screenshot 6 (available from that page) above."

Thanks Wengier, 1. I will try it out. I hope it works so that i can run win98se (I have not loaded your win98se gui yet) on my primary c drive and dos6.22/win31 or wfwg 3.11 on my secondary D drive. 2. If above still wont work I will have to uninstall dos7.10 on my C and install dos6.22. But when I boot up with dos6.22 setup disks, it says i need an upgrade and will not set up dos6.22 at all. Short of formating C how can I go about it? (worst case scenario) or I have to rip up my computer and reset my C as D and D as C (my secondary already has dos 6.22 system files etc.....) Heaven forbid!!

Kaos, If you have Win98GUI or so, then you must not use any disk utils(e.g. SCANDISK, DEFRAG, etc) from MS-DOS 6.22, because they can and will destroy many/all existing Long File Names(LFN)! Instead, you should use the disk utils from MS-DOS 7.10, which support LFNs and FAT32 drives. To everyone: I have already decided to write a documentation and detailed MS-DOS 7.10 FAQ/Knowledge Base(in the format similar to MS KB) during the Christmas holiday. They will cover many Q&A that you may or may not even think of. After that I will not answer any question that is already listed in the Knowledge Base (KB) any more. It's coming soon.

The Knowledge Base (KB) part will include questions or problems and answers in the following 5 areas: 1: Before Installation 2: During Installation 3: After Installation 4: With Windows 3.x and Windows for Workgroups 3.x on top 5: With Windows 9x on top If anyone has any question or suggestion, please let me known, thanks.

Although the problem you mentioned above is caused by a forward compatility problem of WFW 3.x while creating a new permanent swap file, I finally added a volume locking handler to MS-DOS 7.10 Installation Set, so hopefully no one will meet that again if they answer "YES"(now the default setting) to the drive locking question while installing MS-DOS 7.10 via the latest installer! More information will be added onto this page: http://newdos.yginfo.net/msdos71/index.htm

Now the Knowledge Base article for Permanent swap file question is available! See this page: http://newdos.yginfo.net/msdos71/doskbd3.htm