ProfessionalComputerTechnologyAssociates

Q&A 4/5 (DOS) with Large Drives and Lesspace

Question:

I am in a quandary!  My IS department won't let me partition our server's hard drive and I know that Q&A 5.0 will not run properly with the databases on a 17Mb drive.  I think that I can solve the problem with the Lesspace program, but I don't seem to be able to make it run correctly.  What am I doing wrong and how can I tell if I have run it properly?

Answer:

We have been hearing the same tale of woe from many people.  The solution is easy for any DOS version of Q&A (Q&A Windows will still require partitioning).  Put a copy of lesspace.com  in your Q&A program files directory and use any text editor to create the following batch file:

@echo off

C:                         Assuming that the Q&A directory is on the C: drive

Cd\qa5                Assuming that this is your Q&A directory

lesspace

qa.com

lesspace /u

exit

Save this file as "startqa.bat" in the Q&A program files directory. Now, create a shortcut, on your desktop, to this batch file where the command line is:

C:\qa5\startqa.bat    Or the proper drive letter for your Q&A

And the working directory is:

C:\qa5                       Or the proper drive letter for your Q&A

Make sure that all of the rest of the properties of the shortcut are those which have been specified in the Q&A and Windows95/98 link.

To test the effectiveness of this solution run Q&A and press ctrl-F3 at the main menu.  Line 10 of the resulting Systems Information Screen should read something like:

10.     Disk space free (C:)...........: 536,868,864 of 536,868,864 bytes

 showing that Q&A now thinks the data resides on a 500MB drive.