Resize Err Msg Occurs When Running DoubleSpace from Drive A (98842)

SYMPTOMS

This information applies to both Microsoft DoubleSpace and Microsoft DriveSpace. For MS-DOS 6.22, use DRVSPACE in place of DBLSPACE for commands and filenames.

If you start your computer from a 1.2-megabyte (MB) 5.25-inch disk created with SETUP /F, you receive the following error message if you try to resize a compressed volume on your hard disk drive:

DoubleSpace cannot change the size of drive A because there is not enough free space on your original startup drive, which is now drive A. DoubleSpace will need at least 0.14 MB of free space on that drive. Delete some files on that drive, and try this operation again.

NOTE: Although the a 1.2-MB boot disk most commonly causes this error message, you receive this error message any time you try to resize the compressed drive when the boot drive has insufficient disk space.

CAUSE

This problem occurs because the following files must be copied to drive A:

DBLSPACE.INF
DBLSPACE.HLP
DEFRAG.EXE
Backup copy of AUTOEXEC.BAT
Backup copy of CONFIG.SYS

DoubleSpace requires these tools are on boot drive to ensure it can continue if it must restart the computer or if the computer is restarted inadvertently.

WORKAROUND

To work around this problem, make available approximately 151,040 kilobytes (K) of disk space (on the disk in drive A) for the backup files. To do this, delete MSD.EXE and XCOPY.EXE from drive A. For example, type the following commands at the MS-DOS command prompt and then press ENTER after each line:

del a:\msd.exe del a:\xcopy.exe

You should now be able to resize the compressed volume on your hard disk drive.

NOTE: Deleting these two files frees up enough disk space as long as your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files are not larger that 1024K each. If they are larger, you may need to delete additional files from the startup disk.

MORE INFORMATION

The following is a complete list of the files that must be present on the boot drive to be able to resize a DoubleSpace-compressed drive:

DBLSPACE.EXE
DBLSPACE.HLP
DBLSPACE.INF
DBLSPACE.WIN - Temporary file of approximately 100 bytes
DEFRAG.EXE
AUTOEXEC.BAT

These files require approximately 424,079 bytes.

NOTE: The bytes-required values in this article are calculated based on 512K sector allocation.