FreeDOS 1.3-RC5: Norton Disk Doctor 6.0 shows HDD as device driver, FDDs as unknown capacity
Installed FreeDOS 1.3-RC5 floppy only edition on PCem v17 emulator onto a 528MB virtual HDD (image) using machine 80286 with 1MB RAM. When I ran Norton Utilities 6.0 Disk Doctor, the program shows the internal IDE HDD as a "Device Driver" and does according to my knowledge only a fast test of the HDD surface instead of offering a full HDD test. When I select full test, it runs a fast test anyway. The tests are named "Daily" aka fast test, and "Weekly" aka full test. Furthermore, the FDD units are also detected as "Device Driver" of "Unknown" drive capacity, although they FDD drives were empty that time. Don't know if this is a bug of FreeDOS, or just an incompatibility with the Norton Disk Doctor. Other programs like Microsoft Scandisk taken from MS-DOS 6.22 seem to work and don't complain even though Scandisk shows a warning that the OS might be using long filenames which need to be shortened. I'm not using DOSLFN nor Win3.x. When I set the virtual machine RAM to 4MB, I was able to run Norton Disk Doctor from Norton Utilities 2000 and there it said correctly, that the HDD is a "Hard Disk" and offered a full test as well. The HDD being a "Device Driver" issue is present also on real hardware, tested on my old 286-12 laptop with 1MB RAM and 40MB IDE HDD. Whereas in MS-DOS 6.22, the HDD is treated as a real "Hard Disk" in all versions of Norton Disk Doctor. Aside from this, the mentioned programs work correctly. I got the MS Scandisk running in FreeDOS using the CALLVER command.
Best Regards, D. Cernak jr