Category Archives: Bugs

Learn Something Old Every Day, Part IX: AHA-154xB and ASPI4DOS.SYS

The other day I had a pressing “need” to examine the behavior of Adaptec 154x and compatible SCSI HBAs and their DOS drivers. I found the hard way that the AHA-154xB does not work with Adaptec’s last DOS drivers from … Continue reading

Posted in Adaptec, Bugs, BusLogic, SCSI | 6 Comments

This Code Smells of Desperation

A few weeks ago I had the questionable pleasure of diving into the math exception handler of WIN87EM.DLL, the Windows 3.1 math emulator and FPU support library. Actually WIN87EM.DLL appears to have been first shipped with Windows 3.0, and the … Continue reading

Posted in Bugs, Microsoft, PC architecture, x87 | 19 Comments

Failing to Fail

The other day I was going over various versions of the venerable DOS/16M DOS extender from Rational Systems (later Tenberry Software). The DOS/16M development kit comes with a utility called PMINFO.EXE which is meant to give the user some idea … Continue reading

Posted in Bugs, Intel, PC architecture, x87 | 11 Comments

A House of Cards

As one step in the development of the Windows 3.x/2.x display driver, I needed to replace a BIOS INT 10h call to set the video mode with a “native” mode set code going directly to the (virtual) hardware registers. One … Continue reading

Posted in Bugs, Development, Microsoft, Windows | 49 Comments

Learn Something Old Every Day, Part VI: Backward Buffer Overwrite

A few days ago I spent far too much time debugging a largish piece of 16-bit Windows code written in assembler. I found a scenario where (fortunately fairly reproducibly) Windows crashed because the internal state of a DLL got corrupted. … Continue reading

Posted in Bugs, Development, Windows | 24 Comments

Recalibration Needed

The OS/2 Museum recently acquired two horribly slow old Western Digital IDE drives model WD93044-A. These were WD’s first foray into IDE hard disks, combining a rather outdated Tandon RLL drive chassis (3.5″ half-height stepper drives) with WD’s own controller … Continue reading

Posted in Bugs, IDE, Western Digital | 32 Comments

It Was a Problem Back in the Day

Several years ago, I found out the hard way that old versions of DOS have trouble with hard disks with more than 17 sectors per track. To recap, DOS versions older than 3.3 may hang when booting from a hard … Continue reading

Posted in Bugs, DOS, ESDI, Storage | 26 Comments

Nobody Expects…

…the Spanish Inquisition! Well, that too, but also nobody expects that a bland, run-of-the mill Novell NE2000 NDIS driver would crash/hang just because it runs on 486 or later CPUs. I wanted to try the “basic” DOS redirector shipped with … Continue reading

Posted in 486, Bugs, Intel, Microsoft | 7 Comments

Return to Stormville

A while ago I griped about a strangely ill-behaved Intel DX79SR Stormville board. To recap, the board simply refused to take any memory in the 4th memory channel. Since then, there have been very interesting new development in the story. … Continue reading

Posted in Bugs, Intel, PC hardware | 3 Comments

Those Win9x Crashes on Fast Machines…

It is well known that Win9x variants prior to Windows 98 have a tendency to crash on fast CPUs. The definition of “fast” is of course fuzzy but the problems were known to occur on AMD K6-2 processors running at … Continue reading

Posted in AMD, Bugs, Intel, Microsoft | 24 Comments