# FCB unavailable



## mwzak (Sep 13, 2004)

Windows XP is giving an error FCB unavailable if DOS. How is this fixed?


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## MFDnNC (Sep 7, 2004)

Are you running an old program - a solution to this was adding an entry to config.nt

FCBS=8

But I cannot verify that this is the way to do it but it did solve one person problem.


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## JohnWill (Oct 19, 2002)

FCBS=64 would even be better. The error is the ancient MS-DOS 2.0 method of accessing files, before file handles. If you open more than 8 files with FCBS=8, the program will fail.

BTW, another way this can happen is a poorly coded program that doesn't close the files, each time it consumes an FCB. With real MS-DOS 2.0, that error would be missed, since the O/S noticed you were opening the same file again and would re-use the FCP. I suspect the emulation under 2K/XP isn't so forgiving, and probably just used them up.


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