Installing Q&A 4.0 for DOS under Windows NT4.0
Diana Forrester
I received a "Divide error" during the
"Scanning Target Drive" portion of the process. I wanted to install
Q&A locally but tried a different, network drive. The network drive
install was sucessful. Can Q&A v4.0 for DOS be installed on an NTFS
drive? The local hard drive was formatted NTFS while the network
drive was not. Any ideas?
Thanks for your help,
Diana
Lance Jacobs
Diana,
Yes, this is a very common problem in running Q&A 4.0 or 5.0 for DOS with
new computers.
This "DIVIDE" error message is most commonly caused by using Q&A with a
computer that has a real fast CPU. If your computer is faster than 200Mhz,
then this well could be your problem. This problem is not all that unusual
for DOS programs to run into on the very latest and fastest computers.
Fortunately, there is a utility program that can be used with Q&A to slow
down your CPU to 200 Mhz for the Q&A application only. The program is
called MO'SLO.EXE The National Q&A User Group's web site has a link that
takes you to the vendor for this program. So do be sure to check out this
web site, as they have lots of good information there about Q&A. Go to
this address to find out about this MO'SLO program:
http://www.qaug.com/qainfo.htm
Another compatibility issue you need to be aware of is that Q&A can have
problems with larger sized disk volumes under Win 95 or NT. Q&A should
only be used with a volume that is no more than 1.85 Gigabytes in size. So
if you don't have a partition that small, you will need to repartition your
hard drive to give Q&A a volume that size or smaller to work with.
A very popular utility program that allows users to easily adjust and
manage their hard drive partitions is a program called Partition Magic. So
if you find you ever would like to adjust your hard drive partitions, and
would like to be able to avoid having to back everything back up and
reformat in order to do that, their software can help out very well. Feel
free to visit their web site at:
So if you use the MO'SLOW utility to slow down your CPU, and repartition
your hard drive so you have a compatible disk volume to run Q&A under, then
you should be able to continue to successfully use Q&A on a new computer.
Although Symantec does not specifically or officially support using Win 95
or Win NT. But most users do actually find that they can use either Q&A
4.0 or 5.0 for DOS OK as long as they are aware of these issues.
One other issue that affects only NT users is configuring NT to have enough
file handles for DOS applications. To do that, go into the following
folder on your hard drive:
%systemroot%\system32
Then edit the file Config.nt in that folder. Make sure this file has the
following lines in it:
dos=high, umb
device=%SystemRoot%\system32\himem.sys
files=50
Note that the default setting for files= is only 20, which is insufficient
for the needs of Q&A.
Best regards, and let me know if I can be of further assistance.
Lance Jacobs Senior Product Support Analyst [Symantec Corp.]
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http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/sharedtech.nsf/docid/1998527114414
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