[Cialug] "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP"

[Rachel Garrett]

On 2/25/07, Matthew Nuzum <matthew.nuzum at canonical.com> wrote:

> It sounds like a problem I had on my Thinkpad 600e... it boots fine off
> of pressed cds with a capacity of 650MB, but it won't boot off of burned
> CDs with a capacity of 700MB. For a while you could still get the lower
> capacity 650MB CDRs, but now they're very tricky to find.

One of the CDs I was trying was from Edmunds Enterprises, one was from
a site Gentoo Store links to, and I don't know if they press or burn
the CDs they distribute. Two others were burned. But one of them is an
ancient Slackware 7 CD that I kept out of a bargain-bin SAMS book that
I was throwing away. I know that was pressed.

I found an explanation of this Large Disk Access setting here:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2003-December/028090.html

Apparently, this user was experiencing random data loss until he
switched the Large Disk Access setting from "Other" to "DOS".

He appended a lengthy quote from a 1995 Phoenix technical manual
explaining this setting. Depending on where an application gets device
geometry, it's either "well-behaved" (DOS and Windows), "ill-behaved,
but compatible", or "ill-behaved, and incompatible" ("SCO Unix and
some early versions of Novell Netware"). Choosing "DOS" or "Other"
says which ill-behaved applications will work--the compatible, or the
incompatible. *The setting is not supposed to affect DOS or Windows
applications.*

So much for the manual. In practice, Windows XP refuses to boot if I
have "Other" selected. I wonder whether Phoenix was wrong in the first
place, or whether Windows XP figures out device geometry differently
from how Windows was doing it in 1995 when Phoenix added that setting.

--Rachel