themaritimegirl
Experienced Member
Just wondering if anyone has any opinions regarding which suite you prefer, and why. I've always used NU on my DOS machines (8.0 on the 486 and 6.0 on the XT), but I would like to try PC Tools sometime.
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Norton Utilities vs PC Tools?
- Thread starter themaritimegirl
- Start date
Stone
10k Member
6.0 is overkill for an XT.
I use 4.5 AE and it's plenty capable.
I use 4.5 AE and it's plenty capable.
Agent Orange
Veteran Member
For 'system' maintenance I like NU and keep PC Tools onboard for housekeeping. Easy enough to run both of them.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Depends on your application. NU 4.5 AE was probably the best of the lot for vintage systems.
Why not both? You can have both installed on the same drive without any problem (I do). For the XT NU 4.5 and PC Tools 4.30 (classic interface, very retro) or 5.x are fine and for the 486 NU 8.0 and PC Tools 9.0 (it does not support MS-DOS 6.22 drivespace). PC Tools package an impressive amount of utilities and NU have a more professional feeling, IMHO. Ah, and don't forget Mace Utilities!!
Agent Orange
Veteran Member
I have Mace Utilities on 5.25's. They didn't hang around very long.
Trixter
Veteran Member
I use NU 6.0 on my systems unless they are 386+, then I run NU 8. However, I make sure to have NCACHE2 (included in NU 8) on any systems, including XTs, that have shown to benefit from a disk cache in hardware EMS.
I don't think diskedit 4.5 in "logical" mode works with FAT16 filesystems, but I could be wrong. In other words, I'd only run 4.5 on DOS 3.3 and lower.
I tried the Mace Utilities once -- they destroyed my hard drive. The specific program I wanted to use (fairly certain it was "Power-Out Protection") was one that claimed to save your entire session to a disk file, which you could later restore to full operation; I guess you'd call this a "system snapshot". The idea was that reloading 640K of RAM and restoring registers and flags was much faster than loading your software after boot, re-loading your work inside the software, etc. I would agree, but I never got to test it because when it saved the session it completely mangled the directory structure. I'm guessing it tried to write to absolute sectors for speed (instead of just going through the filesystem like a normal person would) and guessed wrong about the drive geometry somewhere along the line. Who knows.
I also remember the Mace Utilities manual(s) looking very slick (glossy black printing), and also remember them collecting fingerprints like nobody's business. This was from before they were acquired by Fifth Generation Systems.
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SomeGuy
Veteran Member
Norton Utils 4.5 works perfectly with PC/MS-DOS 4.0 "bigdos" partitions up to 2GB. NU 4.5 was the first version to support that (NU 4.0 did not), but never had a problem with it.
Also, an untouched copy of NU 4.5 will compress down to about half the size if PKLITE is used on it. Saves a lot of disk space.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
NU 4.5 post-dates FAT16--as I recall, it works just fine. It's FAT32 where it falls on its face.
Stone
10k Member
?????
You're in the wrong corner.
There's no diskedit in NU 4.5 AE.
You must have a later version in mind.
Trixter
Veteran Member
Correct version, wrong name. By "diskedit" I was referring to NU.EXE. However, the point is moot as I am wrong about 4.5 not supporting FAT16.
You're not entirely wrong, Trixter - there is an odd limitation. I have NU4.5 on a 4GB CF card with DOS 5.00. 512MB main partition and an extended partition made up of two logical drives approximately 1.5GB and 1.8GB. NDD from 4.5 will scan the 512MB partition just fine, but complains that it can't handle the two extended partitions, though I can't recall off the top of my head what the exact error message is.
Stone
10k Member
Are you saying that the 1.5 GB and 1.8 GB partitions are FAT16 and not FAT32?
Is the message you get, 'NDD will not work with drives having more than 8K bytes per sector or 16K bytes per cluster'?
Is the message you get, 'NDD will not work with drives having more than 8K bytes per sector or 16K bytes per cluster'?
Stone
10k Member
My guess is that these partitions are actually FAT32. (Your 512MB partition is the real giveaway.)
While they may appear on the surface to be FAT16 (mine does) I know it isn't. I'm willing to bet they were FDISKed with DOS 7.xx. Here's why:
MS-DOS APls that rely on intimate knowledge of the file system layout fail on FAT32 drives. For instance, GetDPB (int21 h, function 32h), Int 25/26h Absolute disk read/write, and most of the Int 21 h, function 440Dh IOCTLs will fail on FAT32 drives.
Think back -- where did you actually FDISK that 4GB CF card?
That would certainly be a logical conclusion, but DOS 5.00 can access them just fine, and that's what I used to create them. Here's a view of that CF card under Linux:
It is a conundrum...
Code:
Using /dev/sdc
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) p
Model: Generic STORAGE DEVICE (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 4035MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 504MB 504MB primary fat16 boot
2 504MB 4030MB 3526MB extended
5 504MB 2077MB 1573MB logical fat16
6 2077MB 4030MB 1953MB logical fat16
(parted) q
#It is a conundrum...
No it's not. From reading elsewhere it seems FAT16 partitions up to 1GB are fine for NDD from NU4.5, but nothing larger. Given the time it was released, I guess that wasn't an unrealistic restriction!
Trixter
Veteran Member
My guess is that these partitions are actually FAT32. (Your 512MB partition is the real giveaway.)
No, I have a 2G partition (on a PCjr, no less) that I fdisk'd with IBM PC DOS 7 running on the target hardware (ie. I didn't take it to a Win95 or MS-DOS 7 FAT32 OS to run fdisk). It's a FAT16 partition that uses a cluster size of 32K. This is valid, and how you get up to the 2G limit of FAT16 as supported by DOS.
themaritimegirl
Experienced Member
Thanks everyone for the responses. I didn't even think you could install both NU and PCT on the same machine, let alone that people actually do it! I thought I tried that on a machine a few years ago, and there were problems because they both had components that ran at boot-time. Maybe I'm thinking of something else.