🚀 go-pugleaf

I've been using stacker 2.0 for a while and was very happy with it.
When Stacker 3.0 came out I was psyched.  Now I know.. if it
ain't broke.. don't fix it.

My system is a Northgate 386/20 with 4 Mb of RAM and two 65 Mb
(before stacking) RLL hard disks.  I move back and forth between
Win 3.1 and DOS 5.0.

After I installed stacker 3 I re-stacked my disks to take
advantage of its improved compression (I got an extra 3 or 4 Mb
on each disk). I then started getting "read errors" from some
programs.  Often the errors weren't fatal; I'd get a message
about a read error, and then the program would manage to read
its code or data and continue to run.

One program, the gif viewer VPIC version 5.1, wouldn't load under
windows, reporting a read-write error.  It would still load from
DOS, or under windows running in standard mode.

Another program (the Miracle piano teacher) gave non-fatal read
errors under windows or DOS, but the errors ceased when I copied
the program from one hard disk to the other (D to C), and then
recopied it to the original drive.  I tried this same procedure
on VPIC and it did not help; it still gives me read errors
under windows and not at the DOS prompt.

WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS gives transient read errors when running 
as a DOS task under Win 3.1, but not when running from the C prompt.
WordPerfect 5.1 for windows gave me the error once when I was
resizing a graphic; it then locked up.

I've run chkdsk, stacker's check utility, and done a surface
scan of the hard disks and no errors are reported.

This appears to be some kind of subtle timing type problem..as
if the data isn't being uncompressed fast enough, so that the
program asking for it momentarily "thinks" that there's been a
disk read error.  BTW, the problem is *not* corrected by using
stacker 3.0's tuner.  It occurs whether I opt for maximum
compression, or minimum compression and maximum speed.

I sure would appreciate advice on this.  Does anybody know if
its possible to "downgrade" from stacker 3 to stacker 2?  I know
you can unstack a drive completely under 3.0, but I've been
using 2.0 for a while, and no longer have enough space on my
drives to unstack them.

Thanks for reading through this tale of woe.

Charles Shopsis, Dept. Chemistry, Adelphi University
shopsis@auvax1.adelphi.edu       or        shopsis@panther.adelphi.edu