DBASE III Plus - problem with command PACK or REINDEX

[bigio]

Hello,
this is my first post and english is not my first language. I thank you in advance for a possible solution.
Perhaps is not the correct place for ask a solution to my problem.

I use vDos from no more than 2 month. I created in '90 years a lot of programms (.prg) for administrate a little commerce.
I had problem to change sistem and find a new possibility to print document from my old DBaseIII programms.
Finally I arrive to vDos that works very fine for printing.

Problem 
recently I must pack or reindex files with  .ndx  and when I try to pack I receive and error (in italian)
as follow:  Spazio su disco insufficiente per file indice  =  Insufficient disk space for index file
when disk space available is around 700 GB.

I search if there is a command to set for incrase disk space in dBaseIIIPlus but I do not found it.

Someone know the problem and the solution to?

Thanks again 

[Jos]

What version of vDos do you use?

vDos reported 123MB free disk space because some real obsolete DOS programs choke on a higher number.

With version 2023.05.01 this is raised to 1.9GB.

Jos

[herman]

This is not a vDos problem, but a Dos space detection problem in dBase.
Make sure you have at least a sufficient percentage of disk space.
I usually use more than 50% for a working dBase environment.
I know that's not very user friendly, but it's no different with a DOS-dBase application
This also in a Window-NTVDM envoirment.

Sorry for my Google English.

What percentage is 700Gb of your total disk space?

Herman

[Jos]

I have to comment:

DOS programs retrieve the total and free space of a disk by calling DOS API INT 21-36h.

Those numbers are then to be calculated by multiplying the set values in the AX, BX, CX and DX registers.

vDos however ALWAYS returns the same values, resulting in almost 2GB total space, 496 bytes less for free space. So the actual total and free space of the drive doesn’t matter.

Problems with large disks in NTVDM will be caused by then too large register values. The DOS program doesn’t anticipate calculating the total and free space (intermediate results exceeding 16 bits).

Jos

[bigio]

Reply to Jos,

thanks very much. I updated the vDos version and it works.

Now I can use it like before.

With the .ndx file I ordered to "pack" (DbaseIIIPlus command) the file with several .ndx files and it didn't work. Now it's OK.



Reply to Herman

I made my old program in the 80's and didn't remember where I can modify the amount of memory, but I worked with the same program (.prg) and files until a few months ago, on an old XP without any space problem on disk.





In any case, now with the new version of vDos everything is ok.

Thank you all

[bigio]

I am sorry,
I used a wrong way to reply to your kind suggestion.

[jamesb52]

Oct 2, 2023 16:10:26 GMT 1 bigio said:

Problem recently I must pack or reindex files with  .ndx  and when I try to pack I receive and error

Not sure if there's any point in replying to these questions, but these are known issues with older dBase applications due to the limited ability of dBase III & IV to process large indexes. Jos is kind enough to fiddle with vDOS to accommodate the dBase flaws, but the problems are due to the limited abilities of the old Ashton-Tate dBase languages. A newer dBase language will have no problem packing and indexing millions of records.