🚀 go-pugleaf

Summary: SuperStor+Windows=trashed FAT

I have tried to use Windows 3.1 under SuperStor 2.04 and have found what
appears to be a *serious* incompatibility, namely that SuperStor cannot
service disk requests coming simultaneously from multiple virtual machines
without crashing the system (and often trashing the FAT for good measure).

I have so far managed to reproduce the symptoms on a Ti'Ko 433PXC and an
IBM PS/2 56SX. The latter using an absolutely standard virgin installation
of both packages.

To see if your system is effected by this problem try the following:

Create a program to thrash your disk; I use THRASH.BAT as follows:
DIR >TMP
DEL TMP
THRASH

Put copies of this in 2 different directories on your compressed disk (can't use 
one directory or you'll get SHARE violations).

Create two enhanced mode DOS sessions (a.k.a. virtual machines) and run a 
different copy of your thrash program in each. Make sure that these sessions 
have their "Exclusive" check-boxes cleared and their "Background" check-
boxes set.

If your system is still alive Move the input focus away from the DOS sessions 
(e.g. click on Program Manager) so that they will have equal priority.

If SuperStor/Windows 3.1 can cohabit safely on your system you should be 
able to arrange your screen with both DOS sessions visible and both scrolling 
for several minutes.

If they can't your system will stop dead or you'll get an integrity violation 
message.

WARNING: The above experiment can sometimes destroy *all* data on your disk :-( 
so I strongly recommend doing a full backup beforehand.

I urge you to perform the above experiment as even if you get data loss from
doing it you would have suffered this loss sooner or later and probably when
it mattered most :-(

Please mail me with the outcome of the above experiment as I would be very 
interested to find out if this problem is universal or peculiar to me. I shall
then post a summary.

If you find that SuperStor / Windows are incompatible on your machine and you
do not have disk space to deinstall SuperStor then you can try setting 
AllVMsExclusive=TRUE in Window's SYSTEM.INI file. This disables DOS 
multitasking and so should avoid the problem (at the price of a serious loss of 
Windows functionality) but I've not tested this.

For the sake of anyone who has not seen this message and may be at risk from data 
loss, please propagate this message to any other BBSs if you think this will help 
others.

I've posted this message before and from the lack of response I can only
conclude that I'm the only looser with SuperStor and Windows.

I have contacted ADDSTOR in the US and their agents in the UK but neither were
prepared to admit that SuperStor was not Windows compatible.
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