As far as I can tell, the MS Office 4.3 installer is not to be blamed for trashing my hard drive. But here's a different warning: Windows 95 and up can safely use a drive bigger than about 8GB without a disk manager, but DOS can't. On Sat, 21 Sep 2002 08:54:45 -0400, I wrote: > > ... What happens when a program (in DOS 5.0) > > tries to write past the 8GB boundary? And on Sun, 22 Sep 2002 09:30:55 +0200, JGrossklass@xxxxxxxxxxx (Stephan Grossklass) responded: > I'd assume a wraparound. I can't prove it, but I think that's what happened. I had assumed that if DOS can see a drive, it's OK to write in it. Apparently, not so. Any program in DOS (or 16-bit Windows in DOS), trying to write on a logical drive spanning the 8GB boundary, can write to sectors at the beginning of the physical drive. For instance, I booted from a DOS floppy and did a DU of the directory where I had partially installed MS Office, writing the output to a file on the same drive. In DOS, the output file looked OK. In Windows NT, the same file looked like a piece of a directory (raw, not formatted like the output of DIR). And the output of DU (which lists directories and subdirectories and their sizes) was not the same in DOS as in WIN NT. I don't understand everything I saw, but it was clear that DOS and Windows NT, supposedly looking at the same file, were not seeing the same data. And it's DOS that sees it wrong. Incidentally, I was mistaken about the strange messages I saw when I tried to install MS Office in Windows NT. I tried again, and the messages, all the same, had window title "Setup Message" and said: Setup has encountered a problem. Please report File='.\misccm.c', Line='447' to Microsoft Product Support Services. Evidently they were from Microsoft, not from a hacker, but they were from the setup program, not from the operating system. Marty Martin B. Brilliant at home in Holmdel, NJ -- To unsubscribe, send a message to ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe calmira_tips" in the body. OR visit http://freelists.org