Win98 Startup Disk

During the boot process using the 98 SUD there appears on the screen a line such as;

A:\call setramd.bat. I have no problems with that. It is just calling a .batch file that sets the RamDrive.

That is followed by two lines that contain a combination of numbers and letters.

It starts with a number then * then followed with a ( space ) [ number(space) letter (space)] then repeats this sequence about 24 times.

These two line are followed by the message " Preparing to start your computer. "

MY question is.

" What are all those numbers and letters for ? "

BTW. To see all of this I had to delete the line @ECHO OFF. That is nothing new to me either. I did that YEARS ago. I like to see whats happening. ( helps me find mistakes to if I do any editing ) And I made very sure all was well before I used the 98 SUD to make a bootable CD. ( after the first WRONG one anyway )

And I do know that this has nothing to do with the actual OS on the machine cause at this point in time nobody even knows what OS exists.

BillyBob

 

I should have included this.

27 * 12 N 13 X and then continues this sequence( after the * ) 22 more times.

BB

 

Hi BB

it's very round-the-houses...

the key to it is the shift loop in SETRAMD.BAT which has been handed a number from FINDRAMD.EXE as an exit code.

it's running DOS! - provided by COMMAND.COM, IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS like on an old DOS system disk.

COMMAND.COM provides enough to run FINDRAMD.EXE

it's really round the houses to trap conditions like if the HDD isn't being recognised by the BIOS because the computer's not set up properly. 3 and 255 are "special" exit codes from FINDRAMD.EXE for this sort of eventuality.

best wishes, HJ.

 

sorry I didn't get that at all clear did I!

it's trying to end up with a letter to give to the RAMDRIVE which is about to get created. It needs to plonk the ramdrive after the HDDs (partitions) which it can find on the machine.

so, if your PC has two HDDs which are going to become C: and D: one day, the answer we're after here would be E:, the letter which is about to get assigned to the RAMdrive.

(all DOSsy EXE's try to return a number - perhaps COMs do too I don't know - 0 usually means success and anything else is some kind of failure code)

findramd does the hard work of finding out how many partitions there are: it passes on the answer as a number - the exit code - same as you would perhaps compare using errorlevel.

the long lines you see are a way of getting from that number to the appropriate letter for the ramdrive.

(it may look like there are two lines but they get "stuck" together into one long line)

although they originate in autoexec.bat, they get passed on to setramd.bat as a parameter

when it goes round the loop, %1 is the first "thing" in the line (the number) and %2 is the next "thing" (the letter)

the lower the (errorlevel) exit code from findramd.exe, the more times these lines get shifted to the left: they get shifted until the number in the line matches... that's the shift loop in setramd.bat, it keeps looping until the number matches

...at which point the next letter along is the answer.

there are two shifts to take care of the number, letter, number, letter layout: shifting twice gets you along to the next number in the line.

like with errorlevels, you have to work the comparisons in decreasing order.

hope that's a little bit better! HJ

 

Thanks

Things are clear enough that I get the idea that it does have to do with setting the RamDrive location.

That is somewhat what I thought anyway.

BillyBob

 

sorry for the muddle! but it's a really tortuous way of getting at it...

there was quite a good bit on errorlevels in old DOS / Win3.x help but it's left out of W9x

if you can access the older help somehow the exit codes for DEFRAG are worth a look - there are quite a few of them.

best wishes, HJ.