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Last night I was editing a Techwriter document in VirtualRPC (running on a 'doze box running Vista with up to date patches). While inserting cross-refereneces, the system froze. Nothing I did cleared the problem. Eventually I had to kill the power. On restarting the machine (then shutting down and restarting, so that 'doze didn't get too confused...) I started up VirtualRPC. Now I get dropped into the RISC OS Boot menu and there is an error box with "An error occured during Boot. File '&.!BOOT' not found" (Btw, shouldn't it be occurred?) Pressing any key gets me into the Manual boot options menu. Exiting to desktop puts me in to some very low res mode where nothing seems to work. Selecting Choices from the Task icon-bar menu produces "Filing system or path BootResources: not present".

Is there any way to fix this? Or should I just reinstall VirtualRPC? I assume that the directory HardDisk4 in the VitrualRPC directory will be trashed by a reinstall, so I have copied that entire directory structure elsewhere.

Why do things like this happen late on a Friday?

Gareth

Sounds like your CMOS file has been corrupted in the freeze-up.

To fix, please see under 'Corrupt CMOS file' in the VirtualRPC in Use 'Supplements' file, downloadable from [url][/url]http://www.virtualacorn.co.uk/support/vrpcinuse/supp.htm[url][/url]

It's in Supplement 10, page 40.

For VirtualRPC-AdjustSA, the (corrupt) CMOS file is in C:\Program Files\VirtualAcorn\VirtualRPC-AdjustSA\Models - then open the folder for whichever ARM emulation you are using, e.g. StrongARM RISC OS Adjust (Jit)

HTH, Alex Hamilton, pp T.O.M.S.

Thanks for the response and for the pointer to the Supplements file.

Turns out I don't have a backup of the !Boot directory... (Once this problem is fixed, that lack of backup problem will be addressed!) So I tried the restore CMOS settings program on the VRPC CD. Program ran without a problem. Tried running VRPC again: same error.

Gareth

Following up on my last post. I had a dig around the VirtualRPC-AdjustSA\Models directory and noticed something odd. There was a directory "StongARM RISC OS Adjust (Jit)" directory (note, "StongARM") in addition to the "StrongARM RISC OS Adjust (Jit)" directory. The modification date on the first directory was today, that on the latter directory some days in the past. I renamed the cmos.ram file in the "StrongARM RISC OS Adjust (Jit)" directory to cmos_corrupt.ram and copied the cmos.ram from the "StongARM RISC OS Adjust (Jit)" directory.

Tried running VRPC, no error message, and the system came up as expected. There was a warning about the previous dirty shutdown, so I immediately did a clean shut down. On re-running VRPC, I got a clean startup. So I may be good to go.

Gareth

Ah, OK, you've come up against the 'StongARM' [sic] typo - which I must admit I'd forgotten about. VirtualAcorn are aware so no doubt it will be fixed.

In effect, running the CMOS.RAM restore utility from the master CD does *not* overwrite the corrupt CMOS file - 'cos the parent sub-folder name is wrong - but you've fixed it anyway. (As a matter of interest, the CMOS files in the other 2 ARM core emulations are correctly overwritten.)

Alex Hamilton, pp T.O.M.S.

Hi,
Sorry that you've had a problem with the VirtualRPC. TOMS are quite right about the typo in the 'CMOS Restore' app on the VirtualRPC CD. It went un-noticed for years

The problem has now been fixed, so any CDs that went out in the last few months should be fine. I have made myself a note to upload a copy of the fixed 'CMOS Restore' along with some suitable explanation/apology once I get 10 minutes.

In the meantime the problem can be circumvented (as you have found) by copying the 'CMOS.RAM' file from the 'StongARM ...' models folder to the correctly spelt 'StrongARM...' models folder.