Ensign - V1N4





'''My son accidentally shut of my OS/2 system using the power switch and didn't shut it down properly. Now whenever I access my D drive (which was formatted as an HPFS disk) I get the error "Incorrect Internal Identifier". Have I lost the contents of that drive?''' HPFS stands for High Performance File System, and is a new way of formatting a hard drive with OS/2. The old DOS system was called FAT, which stands for File Allocation Table. FAT is an unreliable and extremely inefficient file system - it was designed for floppy disks and hard drives just fractions of the size of drives today. As a result, it wastes large portions of the disk and requires frequent "defragmenting" to keep operating at peak speed. HPFS drives have no such problems, and are faster and support long file names natively.

Because they are different, they require special handling, and one of the most important things to do is to shut down your OS/2 system properly, and not just turn it off. Why? Because this gives the system the chance to properly close all of the files on the drive and write any recent changes back. Without a chance to do this, you could corrupt those open files on your drive, or put the drive into an unstable state. Even pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL is better than just turning it off - that key sequence will quickly clean up the drive before rebooting.

Your D drive is in just such an unstable state, and as a result, the system won't let you access it an chance messing up any of the contents. The solution is simple: Type CHKDSK D:/F at any OS/2 command line-prompt. The /F will "Fix" the drive so that it will be back to normal. You will have lost nothing on the drive.

'''Everytime I start a DOS or Windows session, my NUMLOCK turns off. How can I fix that?''' This problem is related to how OS/2 runs DOS and Windows programs. OS/2 creates what is called a VDM, or Virtual DOS Machine at the processor-level in your computer. You can think of this VDM as a small DOS computer existing inside the processor of your computer. OS/2 actually boots DOS inside this little VDM, and either starts your DOS application, or starts Windows inside this VDM as well to run a Windows program. This is how OS/2 can do so many neat tricks with device drivers and memory - for example, you can have different CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files for each DOS program you run - or even boot any version of DOS into the VDM!

The price of this is the bug you describe. When OS/2 boots the VDM the keyboard resets as a function of the hardware inside your computer. The only fix for this bug right now is to add a small utility to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file in the root directory of your hard drive that turns the NUMLOCK back on. Every time a DOS or Windows program is booted, the NUMLOCK will turn off, and promptly be turned back on again by your utility once the DOS boot process reads the AUTOEXEC.BAT file. There are at least 20 of these available on the Internet and various shareware disks.