🚀 go-pugleaf

HARVEY@WUVMD.Wustl.Edu (Bill Harvey) writes:

>My sister has almost her entire c:  hard drive (all but a few kbytes)
>formatted as a DoubleSpace volume.  I managed to screw up her
>config.sys (I added a device= statement which (I guess) is causing it
>to try to load a driver which is not really a driver) so that now she
>can't boot from it.  

Why not use the single-step boot mode?  Press F8 when the "Starting MS-DOS"
message appears, then respond to the prompts to single-step through your
CONFIG.SYS, asking you for each line if you want to execute or suppress it.
When the prompts come to your bad driver, "just say no".  At the next
prompt, press the ESC key to end the interactive boot and continue
normally.

>When we boot from a floppy, we're able to view the directory on the c:
>drive, but the only things that show up are the few hidden files needed
>by DoubleSpace.  That means (I guess) that the config.sys is saved within
>the DS volume.  But I need to be able to edit it to remove this invalid
>device= statement, and I don't know how to get access to it.

Your problem is that the floppy isn't set up to provide the DBLSPACE.BIN
driver.  Assuming that the floppy is at the same DOS level as your hard
disk (6.0 or 6.2), put a copy of the DBLSPACE.BIN file in the *root* 
directory of your floppy, then reboot with it.  Your compressed C: disk
should now be visible.

The easiest way to get a copy of the file onto the diskette would be to
find another computer with the same version of DOS, and copy the file
from the C:\DOS directory to the floppy.  If that isn't an option, boot
from your floppy, then get your DOS upgrade diskettes out and:

   From the first disk, copy the file DBLSPACE.BIN to your C:\ drive
   using the command:

     copy  a:\dblspace.bin c:\foo.bar

   Then put the boot floppy back into the reader and issue the commands:

     copy  c:\foo.bar a:\dblspace.bin
     erase c:\foo.bar

This procedure avoids interference with the hidden file C:\DBLSPACE.BIN
on your hard disk.

Joe Morris / MITRE