WEB EXCLUSIVE: Things That Come in the E-Mail

Ever wonder what kind of mail Jerry receives? This month, we revive an old tradition and open the mailbag. Meanwhile, there's a new system at Chaos Manor; naturally, it's fast, and naturally, installing software on it was a real test of patience. Get the full story in "Fire Three for Effect!" in the December issue of BYTE.

Jerry Pournelle

We've been building systems again. The newest one's called Fireball, for obvious reasons. Fireball is a dual Pe ntium Pro-or soon will be; we'll add the second processor next month-server with RAID capability, built around a Micronics W6-LI motherboard. We had no problems building the system, but installing the software was another story. You'll find a full report of our trials in December's regular Chaos Manor column.

Windows 95 (once you've gotten past the installation blues) is pretty easy to use, but it sure eats up disk space. So do applications. Our intern, Eric Pobirs, poi nts out that some new CD-based games want to put 100 MB of stuff on your system.

And, unlike Windows 3.1, you can't simply exit to DOS and XCOPY one drive to another when you've outgrown your old one. This won't take care of the extended Windows 95 attributes and the hidden files like the registry, which lives in C:\WINDOWS\USER.DAT and SYSTEM.DAT, for the curious. (And if you're not regularly backing these up by hand to spares, you may wish you had, but that's a tale for another time.)

Fortunately, we've found an easier way to move Windows to a larger drive than making a backup on tape and restoring it to the target. PowerQuest's DriveCopy program does nothing but copy an entire volume from one drive to another, and it does so very well. DriveCopy comes with short but complete directions on how to connect the drives together-complete in everything but the actual jumpering for your drive, but that's hardly their fault. After you've gotten past that hurdle, it checks your new drive and then takes maybe 20 minutes to copy a gigabyte drive to your new 4-GB monster. (Of course, your BIOS must support that new drive, too, but almost all Pentium boards support Logical Block Addressing, or LBA, the workaround for very large drives on a PC.)

Probably the only complaint I can make about DriveCopy is that it's too fussy. It absolutely refuses to copy one drive to a shorter one, even if there's plenty of unused space on the source. This presented a problem for Barry Workman, of Workman & Associates, who was re placing a failing drive under warranty with a "direct replacement" drive that was actually from a different manufacturer than the original. (Barry says this happens quite often even with big-name PCs.)

Barry's workaround was to manually set the target drive to a larger number of cylinders than it actually had, so DriveCopy thought there was room. After the copy was done, he let the BIOS take over, and all was well. PartitionMagic would do as well by reducing the size of the source first, and it's probably a bit safer. Be careful, but otherwise, DriveCopy is essential for anyone out of space.

There's a new version of V Communications' ( http://www.vcom.com/ ) System Commander due out before you read this. It will have some partition-sizing capabilities, but it won't replace PartitionMagic; you'll still need both. I can't imagine why any BYTE reader wouldn't want them, and both are recommended.

I have found that Word 97 does a passable job of vanilla Web-page development , but it does some odd things. If you use it-and you can-you will want a good HTML book. Use the View HTML Source capability and be prepared to do some hand tuning. Given that, you can do quite good Web pages with Word 97. I still find it the easiest way to create Web pages from scratch.

A better choice is FrontPage. It's also harder to learn, but you don't have to be a guru to learn it; the parish secretary has been experimenting with it for St. Mary's Web page. FrontPage is the choice of many professional Web-site developers. It's very useful if you use frames and complicated tables. FrontPage really wants you to use it in direct contact with your server, not as an editor to build a page mock-up on your home system which you'll FTP to the server, and it can drive you nuts with its demands to be connected. That in fact is the main reason I don't use it.

A reasonable compromise is Symantec's Visual Page. This doesn't have all the features of FrontPage, but it has enough. It understands frames and tables. There aren't as many built-in graphics like lines and such. It uses modes: you can view your Web material as a Web document, as HTML source code, or as you will see it in a browser. Unlike Word, it doesn't try to do all those things at once. You have to change modes; you can't edit when your links are active or view the active links in edit mode. This can be inconvenient, but I have also had the problem that I wanted to edit a link in Word 97 but couldn't because it kept activating the link when I tried to get hold of it.

For all its problems, I continue to use Word 97 to design and build my Web site, with occasional forays to Visual Page to clean up code glitches. It may not be great, but it's good enough for what I want to do.

One of my regular correspondents is Alan Ogden (arog@bix.com), a longtime friend and fellow comp uter tinkerer. He moderates several conferences on BIX. Some time ago, Alan sent me a report on how to use a SyQuest SCSI drive as a boot disk, and yes, I know I promised to give that report several columns ago. My apologies for delaying this so long. Here is his report. (Alan asks that if you send him mail or questions to please use "SyJet" as the subject.)

Booting Windows NT from a SyQuest SyJet: "Why do it? If you need to boot to different OSes that all think they are entitled to look at any partition that is labeled 'DOS,' this is workable. There are other reasons as well, but if you're thinking of doing this for the security of your data, get a laptop that fits in the safe.

"The reason this won't work for a 'secure' environment goes to the core of how NT runs 16-bit applications, even ones that are entitled to the Flying Windows logo. They run under a DOS emulator, NTVDM with 'WOW' (Win16 on Win32). The simple fact is that I've yet to find what it is that breaks when there is no 'real' hard drive on the system. On the plus side, this is why these 16-bit applications will run on non-386 machines.

"True 32-bit applications will work without a 'real' hard drive being present, and adding one solves the 16-bit application problem.

"So, how do we do this? The first thing to consider is the SCSI host adapter, and the second is the structure that the cartridge reports to NT when its disk label is read. You'll also need a utility to edit the disk label, such as PFDisk, which you can usually find on sites with Linux or FreeBSD distributions.

"Our testing was done with an ISA 486 system using an Adaptec AHA-1542 host adapter. Using its Setup utility, we configured the AHA-1542 to treat all removable media as fixed.

"Current SCSI cards should have Setup utilities that allow for removable media to be treated the same as fixed media. Very old SCSI cards probably can't tell. There are some three- to five-year-old ones, however, that may not work. We suspect that all the cards that are listed as supp orted by NT 4.0 without creating installation disks will work.

"Before doing this to the cartridge that was shipped with the drive, you'll want to copy the files that are on it to another disk or a backup tape. Some of them are neat, and what we are going to do will trash everything that is on the cartridge.

"Set the jumpers on the SyJet to make it SCSI address 0, so that it is the boot device. If you are trying this without a second SCSI drive or the second drive does not provide the termination, you will need to enable the termination on the SyJet. Remember, the terminated device should always be at the end of the cable.

"Now, boot to DOS with a floppy disk that has PFDisk on it. As the machine boots, if your host adapter reports the disks it finds, you should see the SyJet listed.

"It's OK to look at the cartridge with FDisk at this point. Later, when I say 'reboot,' I mean it. Some versions of FDisk will 'fix' a disk label that has changed from what DOS found as it booted.

"What follow s works for this Adaptec adapter. Other values may be required for other adapters.

"Run PFDisk. If the SyJet is at device 0 and there are no IDE disks, the command is 'pfdisk 0.' From its prompt, 'L' will report the disk label. This will look something like:

pfdisk> L
     # Partition table on device: 0
     geometry 726 64 63 (cyls heads sectors)
     #  ID  First(cyl)  Last(cyl)  Name  # start  length (sectors)
     1   6      0        726       DOSbi # 32     2927232
     2   0      0          0       empty # 0      0
     3   0      0          0       empty # 0      0
     4   0      0          0       empty # 0      0
     active: 0 (none)
     pfdisk>

"Now change the geometry with:

     pfdisk>g 1429 64 32

and use 'W' to write the label to the cartridge. Now, reboot, but do it to the NT installation disk. The surest way to successfully install NT is to let it configure itself. That said, the partition that is on the cartridge at this point wi ll have major problems with its structure. It must be formatted.

"If you reject the directory that NT offers to install in, it will offer a menu of partitions for the installation. Delete the offered partition on the SyJet cartridge. After you've done this, follow the prompts to create a new partition. The gotcha is that unless your hardware supports more than 1023 cylinders, that's all you are going to get (i.e., 1 GB). I have not tested installing and using the SyQuest utilities to create a partition in the remaining space.

"One last point. All this must be regarded as experimental. It will take some experimentation to make this work, even with the same hardware used in these tests. Given a real hard drive on the machine, NT presented much the same sense of quality as it does with a noncartridge installation. Based on that, I would expect that those who need such a system will find this to be at least serviceable."

Longtime readers will recall that about once a year , I used to do a colum n called "Things My Postman Brings Me." Now, most of my correspondence arrives via e-mail. In any case, this month seems a good time to revive that tradition. I also confess that as The Burning City nears completion, it has become a time-eating chore, with the end receding asymptotically. We're doing the finale now.

Meanwhile, Things My Postman Brings Me, Revisited.

Many thanks for the September Chaos Manor. I have been struggling to get Adaptec CD Creator working with my Hewlett-Packard Surestore CD-R drive for a few weeks now, and Adaptec support has been nonexistent-nothing but automatic replies from the Web server.

Your suggestion concerning IDE and SCSI CD-Rs and drive-letter assignment prompted me to investigate further.

I am trying to get it working under NT 4.0 on a Compaq Deskpro 6000 with an Adaptec 2940 Ultra SCSI controller. In the end, I had to remove the ATAPI driver and then reinstall it, because it appeared to get tangled with the Adaptec controller. It appear s in the SCSI Devices Control Panel applet for some odd reason. Removing the ATAPI driver from there while leaving it in the Devices applet cured 99 percent of my problems and stopped audio CDs placed in the IDE CD-ROM drive from locking up and restarting desktop Explorer.

Mike Davies
M.J.Davies@btinternet.com

A number of readers suggested that rather than assign the "normal" CD-ROM drive as R, I assign the CD-R drive to that letter. It does in fact work, and on a stable system, it might make sense to have the usual CD-ROM drive as E with the CD-R drive as R. Be aware, though, that adding any kind of SCSI drive such as SyJet or Zip or magneto-optical (MO) will displace the CD-ROM drive at E, and there's nothing at all you can do. Of course, you could assign it as Q and the CD-R drive as R, and those would be stable. Until you fill all the letters from C to R, anyway....

I was encouraged by your review of Adobe PhotoDeluxe to find that my difficulties wi th it were likely the result of a poor program, as I suspected, rather than incompetence on my part, as I secretly feared. It came bundled with the Epson Stylus Color 500, an ink-jet printer that may not reach quite the heights that your Alps printer achieves, but nonetheless produces some passable photographic copies.

Unfortunately, much of the flexibility that was touted for the Epson printer lay in the bundled software. Try as I might, I could not install it in my OS of choice, OS/2. Aha, you say, that's the problem! I could not install successfully the correct Win32s DLL version.

I finally decided to try to install it on a native Windows 3.1 file allocation table (FAT) partition. I was desperate-and angry. I am enamored of OS/2 and will likely continue to use it until a worthy successor is developed, or they pry my beloved Trackman Marble from my cold, dead hand. After repeated attempts to install it, receiving error messages about other DLLs that (I believe) are required for Windows 95 and should n't have been needed for the 3.1 installation, or receiving no error messages and simply having the program freeze on start-up, I threw up my hands and looked for alternatives.

Lo and behold, I remembered my trusty copy of CorelDraw for OS/2, which contains a Win-OS2 version of PhotoPaint. I installed the Windows printer driver in Win-OS2 and printed from CorelDraw. The results have been quite good for the most part, although I suspect there are refinements in PhotoDeluxe that I am missing out on. I printed a realistic-looking JPEG of Gillian Anderson that even impressed my wife with its quality.

Please note the unabashed plug for OS/2. I continue to cringe at the imbecilic marketing and development strategies demonstrated by IBM. However, it remains the best desktop OS.

I always enjoy your column, even if it doesn't feature kind words about OS/2 any more.

Mark Henigan
drivnzen@netfeed.com

Ingenious. I am afraid that I have given up on OS/2. I do so reluctantly, because it had many features I liked, and Microsoft desperately needs the competition. Alas, as far as I can tell, IBM has given up on OS/2, and without IBM, it is doomed to fall further and further behind. OS/2 did a lot of good. It forced Microsoft to think about the future, and many of the improvements found in Memphis (now Windows 98) and NT 5.0 can be traced to OS/2. I'm afraid I have to say that NT 4.0 is now the "best" desktop system, at least for Intel machines.

Now two letters on SCSI tricks:

I have just finished reading your September column. You wrote "...to use an external writable drive and leave it turned off: turn it on and reboot..." This is to inform you of a shortcut when using external SCSI devices and turning on the power after the system has booted.

In Windows 95: Open System Properties (I right-click on My Computer and choose Properties) and go to the Device Manager tab. Click on the Refresh tab. Windows 95 should locate the new device. I have a Microtek sc anner that sometimes needs two refreshes.

There is no easy way to do this in Windows NT, yet. I stop and restart the SCSI controller, but I haven't tried this with a SCSI C drive.

Pete Cantwell
cantwell@gj.net

I read in your September column that you had to reboot a system for a SCSI connection to be recognized. I read in Windows Annoyances (O'Reilly and Associates, ISBN 1-56592-266-2) on page 109 that you can manually have Windows 95 scan the SCSI bus to recognize connected devices. It does what removing and reinserting a PC Card does with the Plug and Play BIOS.

To do this, go to Device Manager, select the "view devices by connection" option, and then click on refresh. After several seconds, the device should come up on the connection list. If not, go to the SCSI controller and expand it out to see the devices connected to it. Apparently, checking the SCSI icon in the Control Panel in NT 4.0 works the same way. There are some SCSI devices this ma y not work for. I have tried it on my desktop at home with an Iomega Zip card and Zip drive, and at work with a laptop and docking station with an Adaptec AHA-1542 controller, Zip drive, and HP ScanJet IIc. So it seems to be a hidden capability that would save a reboot or two when switching system configurations. Hope this tip makes life easier.

David Dodge, Contributing Editor, Quad-Cities Computer Society
DavidDodge1@compuserve.com

This often works, but it doesn't always. The Fujitsu MO drive isn't always seen by refresh. That is, if I leave it off, bring up the Cyrix 6x86 P166, and turn on the MO drive and do the refresh, sometimes it will then appear as a usable drive and sometimes it won't--I have absolutely no idea why. I hadn't known how to do this with NT. Thanks to both of you.

I read with amusement your recent trials with the brain-dead CD access in Chaos Overlords. While reading it, all I could think of was a similar problem with Age of Rifle s. Then I got to the end of the article and saw that you've been playing that, too. Be warned, if you have two CD-ROM drives in a machine, the game won't play with sound. It can find the CD-ROM (in the first drive, please) for the copy-protection scheme, but when it comes time to find the CD to get the sound files, it gets confused.

I wasted a lot of time on this after I added a new 15´ CD-ROM drive and kept the old 4´ drive in the machine to play music CDs. It wasn't until I noticed the message (that stays on the screen for less than a second!) that CD functions were disabled that I figured it out. Now I have to boot to plain DOS and disable the second CD-ROM drive when I load the SCSI driver to play the game with sound. And don't even get me started on what happens with games that scan your drive partitions for free space when you have a vacant drive letter. Lately, it seems that just about every game has some brain-dead auto-configure "feature" that barfs if you have any setup that differs from one har d drive with one big (and wasteful) partition on C and one CD-ROM drive on D. If that's all they can handle, why bother with "auto" scan? Oh well, I just saw an opportunity to vent a little....

By the way, have you heard of DOSiX? If not, take a look at this: http://athena.asms.state.k12.al.us/~mlyohe/dosix/ . It looks like one of those "why hasn't anybody thought of this before?" things. But then again, IBM did. They threw tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars at it, and it just didn't have a chance while memory cost more than $50 per megabyte.

Cheers,
Jay Schamus
jaylord@rcinet.com

Thanks! I don't think I ever heard of DOSiX, but I'll have a look when I can. And thanks for the comments on games. If enough of us vent, maybe the gam e companies will listen.

I'm a software engineer and have been following your BYTE column for many years now. I'd like to express my admiration for your writing and your pragmatic approach to life.

In particular, I enjoy the funny installation-gone-wrong stories, where interrupt requests (IRQs) and WIN.INIs go astray. I love telling the Ezekial story to my boss whenever he refuses to upgrade our hardware.

You once complained about not having the ability to resume broken downloads from Netscape or Internet Explorer. I discovered a tool that will let you do that (both FTP and http) and some other useful things. It will also get a list of all the other sites that have this file, plus the number of hops and connection speed to each site. The tool is called Go!zilla. It's available at http://www.gizmo.n et/gozilla .

I'm very happy you're embracing NT 4.0 and multiprocessor machines, and I hope you'll use NT's built-in NTFS striped sets with parity in the future (it makes sense if you believe in fault tolerance, which I think you do).

The Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) pages on your site are great reading, and I found myself looking for more of the stuff on the Internet. The NASA pages were funny. They grudgingly accept the Space Ship Experimental (SSX) concepts, but they still keep the shuttle alive by scrapping vertical takeoff vertical landing (VTVL).

I've been working with Borland Delphi for a few years now for database applications. I decided it's time to move to Java using Symantec Visual Cafe Pro, mainly because of installation issues (all the user needs is a browser and Internet connection). I ended up becoming very disenchanted with Java. The implementations of the Java virtual machine (JVM) are very different across browsers. Symantec is fighting with JavaSoft over precision of data typ es and dates that give up after the year 2000. It looks like the Unix fiasco all over again (the camel was designed by a committee and all that).

I'm telling you all that in case you're considering Visual Cafe Pro as the next logical step after Delphi-because of the cross-platform and installation advantages-for Roberta's reading program. Beware Java: It's immature and absurdly overrated.

Finally, I've been reading science fiction by you and Niven since I can remember, and I'd like to thank you for it.

Dan Black
Melbourne, Australia
danblk@hotmail.com

Thanks for the warning. At the moment, I am exploring Visual Basic 5 because of its Class Modules, which will let me set up a huge set of utilities through API calls. The Navy is very enamored of Java, but I haven't yet been caught by that particular bug. Thanks also for the tips and the kind words.

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Product Information

DriveCopy..
..................$29.95

PowerQuest
Orem, UT
Phone:    801-437-8900
Fax:      801-226-8941
E-mail:   
info@powerquest.com/

Internet: 
http://www.powerquest.com


Visual Page..................$79.95

Symantec
Cupertino, CA
Phone:    800-441-7234
Phone:    541-334-6054
Fax:      541-984-8020
E-mail:   
custserv@symantec.com

Internet: 
http://www.symantec.com/


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Jerry Pournelle is a science fiction writer and BYTE's senior contributing editor. You can write to Jerry c/o BYTE, 29 Hartwell Ave., Lexington, MA 02173. Please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope and put your address on the letter as well as on the envelope. Due to the high volume of letters, Jerry cannot guarantee a personal reply. You can also contact him on the Internet or BIX at jerryp@bix.com . Visit Chaos Manor at http://home.earthlink.net/~jerryp/ .