Maximum PC

okay, I know it's odd to see DOS questions in this day and age, but...

I have been playing around with Bart's bootable CD, and managed to make some customizations in order to get the cd to recognize firewire and usb storage devices in Ghost, as well as a few other tweaks and customizations.

However, after putting entries for the USB and Firewire drivers (i have absolutely determined these are the conflicting files), whenever i boot with emm386 support (in either max memory or most compatible mode) i get a message "emm386-unrecoverable priveleged operation error #(symbol for pi)3".If I boot without emm386, everything works fine.

so here are my questions:

How useful/important is emm386? I know it enables acces to memory above 640KB, but since i'm operating with such heavy emulation and other nifty features, is this even doing anything really? I don't appear to to have any problems running without it.

Is it possible to get these usb and firewire drivers to coexist with emm386? not sure if this is even really answerable without a lot of trial and error, but my hope is that there is some way to modify the config.sys file to make them coexist.

I am pretty much a noob at programming (if you can even call these simple modification that), so any advice or tips would be helpful. I'm not sure what most of these switches actually do, but would taking out the "noems" switch and adding the "ram" switch help? or perhaps changing the order in which things are loaded would help?. I am using the USB and Firewire drivers that Ghost puts on it's recovery floppy, and using a modified cdrom.img with the following config.sys file:

[menu]
menuitem=AUTO, Boot with emm386 (most compatible)
menuitem=MAX, Boot with emm386 (max memory)
menuitem=NOEMM, Boot without emm386
menuitem=CLEAN, Clean boot
menudefault=AUTO,5

[AUTO]
switches=/f
break=off
dos=high,umb
files=20
buffers=20
device=bin\usb\aspiehci.sys /int /all
device=bin\fwr\aspi1394.sys /int /all
lastdrive=z
device=\bin\himem.sys /testmem:off /v
device=\bin\emm386.exe /v x=d000-d8ff h=128 noems notr
shell=\command.com /e:1024 /p
devicehigh=\bin\ifshlp.sys

[MAX]
switches=/f
break=off
dos=high,umb
files=20
buffers=20
device=bin\usb\aspiehci.sys /int /all
device=bin\fwr\aspi1394.sys /int /all
lastdrive=z
device=\bin\himem.sys /testmem:off /v
device=\bin\emm386.exe /v h=128 noems
shell=\command.com /e:1024 /p
devicehigh=\bin\ifshlp.sys

[NOEMM]
switches=/f
break=off
dos=high,umb
files=20
buffers=20
device=bin\usb\aspiehci.sys /int /all
device=bin\fwr\aspi1394.sys /int /all
lastdrive=z
device=\bin\himem.sys /testmem:off /v
shell=\command.com /e:1024 /p
device=\bin\ifshlp.sys

[CLEAN]
shell=\command.com /p

Thanx in advance!
[/url]

Have you tried the HIGHSCAN option with EMM386? It might or might not help.

I used to use it like this:

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS HIGHSCAN

I'll give it a try, thanx Flytrap! Unfortunately not sure when I'll have a chance. Just found out our contract is up early and we have to get ready to pack up and go back home.

There was also another option you could toss in the EMM386 line that would free up memory reserved for monochrome displays and add it to the pile of conventional memory.

I cant find it at the moment but I'll see if I can look it up when I get home from work.