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┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ System Commander - Dennis Publishing Lite Edition Notes │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ CONTENTS A. Introduction F. OEM Windows - erases all! B. SC2000 Advantages G. Troubleshooting C. Lite Feature Summary H. Technical Support D. Important Issues I. Disk managers/EZ-Drive E. OS Restrictions J. Ordering Information A. Introduction System Commander Lite Edition provides many of the features of our full System Commander 2000 (SC2000). You will be able to boot multiple OSes that reside in separate partitions. This special Lite edition, like SC2000 supports every OS on the PC platform including Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, Linux, DOS, and all other OSes that run on a PC. Unlike SC2000, you will have to prepare your system manually, using the disk partitioning tools from your OS, such as FDISK. If you do not feel comfortable doing this, you might want to purchase SC2000, which preforms these operations automatically, and offers a large number of additional capabilities and features. See below for more about SC2000. IMPORTANT When installing new OSes or changing partitions we always recommend you have a backup of any important data and programs. The System Commander Lite manual is readable with Adobe Acrobat. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat, it can be downloaded free at WWW.ADOBE.COM. Click on the "Get Adobe Acrobat" button. B. SC2000 Advantages System Commander 2000 offers the following additional benefits over our Lite edition: OS Wizard - Automatic OS Preparation The OS Wizard takes all the guess work out of installation of a new OS. If necessary, OS Wizard can automatically find space for the new OS, create the new space and prepare the area for the new installation. The OS Wizard also allows you to override its recommendations to set your own size and location for a planned OS. Partitioning SC2000 provides an advanced, easy to use, partitioning component. You can create, delete, copy, move, format, and even resize existing partitions. SC2000 supports the ability to resize Windows 95/98/NT/2000 and Linux partitions (FAT, FAT32, NTFS, Linux EXT2, and Linux Swap). Also included are converters between FAT and FAT32, and NTFS and compressed NTFS to FAT/FAT32. OS support Supports every OS that runs on the PC platform. In addition, SC2000 allows you have over 100 OSes on a single system. This includes OSes installed to different drives, logical and primary partitions, and even multiple OSes installed in the same partition, so long as the OS allows it. The Lite edition only supports OSes installed on the first drive, in primary partitions (four maximum). Special SC2000 features * Automatic handling of all types of Linux installations - using the Superblock or Linux installed through the MBR. * BackStep Wizard - Allows you to undo OS Wizard partitioning operations and manual partitioning operations made through SC2000. * Undo Delete and Undo Format * In addition to installation on Windows 95/98 and DOS systems, SC2000 can now be installed in NTFS and Linux systems. * True-DOS for Windows 95/98/Me to access a true DOS prompt Key Benefits * Management of up to 100+ different operating systems: up to 32 FAT compatible OSes in one partition up to 56 primary partitions on up to 14 drives up to 16 OSes in logical partitions up to 4 OSes which boot through a non standard MBR * Special diskette drive support boot from A: or B: even if diskette booting is turned off in your BIOS setup. * Automatic management of hidden system files and configuration files such as AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, BOOT.INI, etc. * Select a time-out period to automatically make a selection * View partition information and change bootable status * Master Boot Record and MultiFAT partition boot record virus detection and repair * View and edit files such as CONFIG and AUTOEXEC at boot time Technical Highlights * Fully compatible with Windows 95/98, NT, Windows 2000, Linux, OS/2 Warp, NetWare, Solaris, other Unix variants, DOS and all other PC compatible OSes * Can be installed into any standard FAT partition, including the FAT32 option in Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows 98/2000. * No bytes remain resident in memory * Comprehensive boot validity checks and recovery C. Lite Feature Summary > Management of up to 4 different operating systems in primary partitions on the first drive > Menu selections offered before any operating system runs > Remembers the last selection made > Choose from a number of unique sound effects when System Commander's menu appears > Select a time-out period to automatically make a selection > Automatically detects newly installed OS, by name > View partition information Lite Edition Technical Highlights > Fully compatible with Windows 95/98, NT, Windows 2000, Linux, OS/2 Warp, NetWare, Solaris, other Unix variants, DOS and all other PC compatible OSes > Can be installed into any standard FAT partition, including the FAT32 option in Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows 98/2000. > No bytes remain resident in memory D. Important Issues Disk Compression System Commander is fully compatible with disk compression, but must be installed in the non-compressed C drive. Normally System Commander will identify the non-compressed disk for you. GoBack is not compatible Our testing with GoBack v1 and v2 has shown it is not compatible with any boot management products including System Commander. If GoBack is installed prior to System Commander, it will not let System Commander complete its installation. If System Commander is installed prior to GoBack, then GoBack will disable System Commander. The reason for these problems is that GoBack partly resides in the MBR, where boot management products must reside. While System Commander has a special MBR boot feature that solves this obstacle, GoBack also alters the FAT and FAT32 partitions into custom non-FAT partitions. (which also prevents any partition resizing). If you would like to have boot management and the ability to have partitioning, you might consider an alternative product. One product, CoreSave, does not change your FAT partitions and is compatible with boot management. CoreSave is available at www.innovativesoftware.com. E. Operating System Restrictions Each OS has specific installation restrictions defined by the OS vendor. For your convenience, we've summarized the key aspects of OSes relating to installation limitations on the hard disk. This is not a comprehensive list and vendors may change the limitations in future versions. The chart shows where the bootable portion of the OS can be installed. Every OS can be installed in a primary partition on the allowed hard drives. Some OSes can install into a logical partition, which is a portion of an extended partition, or a drive other than the first. This Lite edition only supports OS installations in primary partitions on the first drive. The MultFAT feature is only available in the full System Commander products. When known, we've also shown the manufacture's minimum partition size for its installation. To install applications, and/or have any free disk space to work with, you should always allocate more disk space than the minimum size shown. Newer versions, than those specified, will usually require a larger minimum disk partition. Boot Logical min MB OS Name Vendor Drives partition size notes ───────────────── ──────────────── ─────── ───────── ───── ───── AIX IBM 0 only no 100 9 BeOS Be any yes 250 BSDI Unix Berkely Software 0 only no 80 Btron 1B Btron 0 only no 40 Coherent Unix Mark Williams any no 15 9 CP/M Digital Research 0 only no 10 9 CTOS Unisys 0 only no 40 DOS all 0 only no 3 DOS/V IBM/Microsoft 0 only no 5 FreeBSD all any no 80 Interactive Unix Sun Microsystems 0 only no 20 JexeOS Toshiba 0 only no 100 Linux all any yes 15 Lynx Lynx Real-Time 0 only no 50 Minux all 0 only no 30 9 NetWare v2 Novell 0 only no 20 NetWare v3 & v4 Novell 0 only no 55 2 NetWare v5 Novell 0 only no 500 2 NeXT Step Next 0 only no 100 9 OpenStep Next 0 only no 120 9 Open Server SCO 0 only no 100 5 OS/2 v1.x IBM 0 only no 20 1 OS/2 v2 to v4 IBM any yes 40 1,4 Pick Pick Systems 0 only no 50 1 QNX QNX Software 0 only no 50 Solaris v4 Sun Microsystems any no 70 7 Solaris v7/v8 Sun Microsystems any no 500 7 Theos Theos Software 0 only no 10 UnixWare SCO/Novell 0 only no 80 5 Venix Venturcom 0 only no 100 9 Windows 95 Microsoft 0 only no 40 1,6,8 Windows 95J Microsoft 0 only no 80 1,6,8 Windows 98 Microsoft 0 only no 250 1,6,8 Windows 98J Microsoft 0 only no 250 1,6,8 Windows Me Microsoft 0 only no 500 6,8 Windows NT v3.1 Microsoft 0 only no 90 1,3 Windows NT v3.5 Microsoft 0 only no 100 1,3 Windows NT v4.0 Microsoft 0 only no 220 1,3 Windows 2000/NT Microsoft 0 only no 800 1,3,8 notes: 1 - OS can be installed in the MultiFAT partition. 2 - This OS is launched after DOS is booted. Information is stored in a separate non-bootable partition. 3 - A portion of the NT boot software is installed in the MultiFAT partition. The remainder can be installed in any FAT primary or logical partition on any drive. 4 - If installed outside the MultiFAT partition, OS/2 requires IBM's boot manager to be installed in a separate partition during installation. Boot manager is not required once OS/2 is installed, when using System Commander. 5 - The installation may move partitions around, causing problems for other OSes. In addition, when partitions are moved like this, System Commander may replace your OS descriptions with generic names. Menu names are associated with the physical partition number and not the data in the partition. No data is lost, but you may want to go through and update each OS description under the Setup option, and verify Local special options are set correctly for each OS choice. 6 - The boot portion is similar to a standard DOS, but significant portions of the OS can be installed on other drives. 7 - Solaris documentation indicates it only supports booting from a diskette when installed on any drive other than drive 0, but System Commander will properly boot Solaris from any IDE drive, without a Solaris boot diskette. Some SCSI controller/drive combinations may not allow anything other than booting Solaris from the first disk. 8 - Can be installed in and understands FAT32 partitions. (For Windows 95, only OSR2 supports FAT32). 9 - This OS is no longer available, either due to being discontinued on the PC, and/or the manufacturer is no longer in business. F. OEM Windows can erase everything! During the installation of some OEM versions of Windows95/98, the installation program may or may not prompt you to format or repartition your hard drive. This means it could erase all files and erase all partitions on your drive, including non-FAT partitions! This operation depends on how the OEM set up the specific OEM version of Windows, as some OEM versions behave nicely (i.e. they might warn you if it is about to erase everything). In general, unless you plan to erase everything on the drive and start over, we recommend only using the full retail or upgrade packages of Windows 95/98. System Commander has no control over how the OEM Windows erases partitions. USE CAUTION when installing an OEM version on a system that has an existing operating systems you wish to keep. OEM versions often have the words printed on the CD-ROM "For Distribution Only with a New PC". G. Troubleshooting Most problems are easily resolved as described in the manual under the Troubleshooting chapter. The SCIN program contains a complete knowledge base of problems and solutions which our own technical support staff use. It also includes common questions and answers. To access this extensive database, run SCIN, and select Troubleshooting to start the knowledge base engine. System Commander's installation always provides a Disable/Remove options, available from the hard disk or the diskette. Refer to the uninstallation instructions, should you need to do this. BootXY. If immediately after installation a "BootXY." message appears, see the Troubleshooting chapter, under Messages from System Commander at boot up for reasons why this might occur and how to easily correct it. In most cases, you will be given the option to boot from one primary partition from the first drive. From the Boot error message, the first charter "X" indicates the basic type of error that occurred. These problems include: 0 - Error reading the master boot record 1 - No FAT partition found on drive 0 2 to 5 - After looking at all 4 partitions, either the OS partitions that were found had: disk errors reading sectors, or more likely, the SYSCMNDR.SYS file in the root directory was not found A - Disk error reading FAT B - Disk error reading SYSCMNDR.SYS C - Defective cluster encountered F - Could not find SYSCMNDR.SYS in FAT32 partition G - Problem reading SYSCMNDR.SYS file H - Contents of SYSCMNDR.SYS are damaged The second "Y" character indicates the error code returned from the hard disk BIOS. It may indicate the hard disk or controller has some type of problem, or could indicate bad partition information on the disk. Errors "0" and ">" are not a BIOS error, but indicate the desired data was not found on the disk. BIOS error codes are: "Y" Character Hard Disk BIOS error ───────────── ─────────────────────── 0 invalid or missing data 1 invalid drive or command 2 missing address mark 3 write protected 4 sector not found 8 DMA overrun (time-out) : bad sector detected ; bad track detected > invalid or missing data @ ECC error during read A ECC error during read P disk controller/drive problem p seek operation failed ▒ time-out - no response others undocumented BIOS error For example, an error message BootA@. indicates that System Commander was attempting to read the FAT, but the controller found an ECC error (which indicates a defective sector in the FAT data area). At a minimum, run Microsoft's SCANDISK on the drive and have it correct any errors. Be sure to perform the optional surface scan within SCANDISK. As another example, the error message Boot2>. appears. This indicates that the SYSCMNDR.SYS file could not be found in any primary partition on the first drive. To fix this, boot from a diskette and perform a full install. H. Technical Support If you followed the manual, you are unlikely to have any problems. The chapter on troubleshooting covers some of the rare problems which might be encountered. Seemingly bad problems like "Invalid COMMAND.COM" are usually solved easily, and are described in this chapter as well as the SCIN troubleshooting database (see prior section for details). You may also wish to check our web site for fact sheets and other helpful information. Paid technical support for this lite version is available in the USA. Please have your credit card ready. (408) 965-4018 (Paid support, 9 am - 5 pm PST M-F) While we can help you with problems related to System Commander, we cannot assist you with using or solving problems within a specific OS. For these issues, you can contact the OS vendor or a third party help desk service. I. Disk Managers/EZ-Drive Some systems use a software disk manager like Disk Manager or EZ-Drive/EZ-BIOS. These products allow large drives to work with old systems. Older systems could not support drives greater 8GB, and very old systems were limited to 540 MB. System Commander is compatible with current releases of these products. Versions of EZ-Drive prior to version 9 do not seem to always upgrade properly, and may still fail to work. If you must use EZ-Drive, you may need to back up the system, remove EZ-Drive entirely and install version 9. Then restore all your files from the backup. SPExports (a very old and rarely encountered disk manager) is not compatible with any boot management, and is not compatible with most OSes (DOS and Windows are the exception). If you are using SPExports, we recommend switching to Disk Manager or EZ-Drive, or better yet, remove it altogether as described below. Keep in mind disk managers work fine for DOS and Windows 95/98, but will prevent most other OSes from running on your system. If you plan to use any other OSes, you might consider a hardware upgrade to support all OSes. These upgrades will also let the hard drive run in it's fastest mode of operation, allow you to boot directly from a diskette, and gain back additional main memory. Instructions for advanced users and technicians Hardware upgrade options: 1) Replace the IDE disk card with an EIDE card that has LBA support (often stated on the box "supports drives > 500 MB"). Be aware that some very cheap cards do not have a BIOS ROM, and include a software disk manager instead. Since the whole idea is to get rid of the software disk manager, the cheapest cards will provide no benefit. 2) Replace the motherboard's BIOS with a new one. One company that sells new BIOSes is Unicore at 1-800-800-2467. 3) Install a BIOS extender card, such as Unicore's LBA Pro. The LBA Pro adds a BIOS that is fully LBA compatible, and requires no cable changes. Contact Unicore at 1-800-800-2467. 4) Replace the computer or motherboard with a Pentium or better system. All new motherboards support large drives. Important - To remove Disk Manager or EZ-Drive, it is necessary to back up your system. Neither product offers an uninstall option as of this writing, and once the disk manager product is removed all data on the drive is lost! Once the system is backed up, you can change your hardware. After the hardware is updated and the BIOS CMOS setting are updated for the drive, is necessary to use a boot diskette that boots BEFORE the disk manager runs. Use a partitioning product (like Windows/DOS FDISK) and delete all partitions. These partitions usually appear as non-FAT. Now you can create and format a new partition(s) and restore your data from the backup. J. Ordering Information To purchase System Commander or our other products contact us at: V Communications, Inc. 2290 North First St., Suite 101 San Jose, CA 95131 USA (408) 965-4000 (Sales) (408) 965-4014 (FAX) We also offer very attractive volume discounts and multi-site licenses. Contact our Sales department for additional information. Additional information is available at www.v-com.com, our System Commander Web site. ┌──────────────────────┐ │ End of Notes │ └──────────────────────┘