DOS 5 weirdness

[Vorticon]

Hi.
I recently saved a battered 386 desktop machine from the dumpster and have been rebuilding it. I installed IBM DOS 5.0, Win 3.1 and the drivers for a generic ISA sound card. The machine has 640K of base memory and 3megs RAM of extended. Everything is working perfectly, except for some of the DOS applications.
For example, trying to run EDIT, BASICA or QBASIC simply hangs the system. DOSSHELL works just fine and the core commands like DIR, FORMAT and such have no issues.
I have never encountered this kind of issue before and I am totally baffled.
I tried various iterations of the AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS, disabling the sound card and mouse drivers, changing the FILES limit etc... without effect.
DOS gaming software seems to install and run normally.
Has anyone here encountered something similar in the past?

[Brutman]

Run a memory tester. There is a reason why the machine was discarded. ;-0

[Vorticon]

I tried running Memtest86+ and all it does is reboot the system.
The motherboard on that computer has discreet socketed memory chips rather than the DIMMs, so replacing the memory is not an easy option.
I think I's just going to replace the entire motherboard with a 486 one and hopefully my problem will go away.

[Brutman]

Try another memory test program before you sacrifice the motherboard to the bit bucket, but yes, it's a bad sign if that won't run.

Look for one of the older programs like Ramtest; you used to be able to find these programs on the old FTP sites like SIMTEL.NET. Any old BBS shareware archive will have a selection to choose from.

[Vorticon]

Tried Ramtest, and it hangs the system on Pass 1. I think you're right about the system memory being bad.
I guess I gave that board a good shot, but it's time to put it out of its misery...

[Trixter]

I don't think the board is bad. Rather, maybe it is the hard drive that is bad. You said yourself some games install and run correctly.

Try CHECKIT as a memory tester.

[Vorticon]

Actually everything installs and runs correctly, including Win 3.1. It's just the DOS applications supplied with IBM DOS 5.0 that are giving me trouble, excluding DOSSHELL. When trying Memtest or Ramtest, I am doing so from a bootable floppy, so the hard drive is not in the loop, and they still hang.
I'll try CHECKIT and see if I have better luck with it. I'm also going to use a known working copy of EDIT (from my PCjr) in case there has been some corruption in the DOS files.

[Vorticon]

So I transferred all my DOS 5.0 system programs from the PCJr to the 386 PC, and now everything is working as it should... I also downloaded BASICA 3.0 from the internet and that works fine as well. So it looks like that either the original IBM DOS files got corrupted somehow (unlikely) or IBM DOS is having some difficulties with the hardware given that it's a clone. The motherboard is a not the standard AT board, but rather looks very proprietary. I can't seem to find a manufacturer's name on it either. The memory test programs are all having issues running on it still though but the general function is fine. It had an alkaline 4.5V CMOS backup battery pack that was dead, and I replaced that with 3 AA alkaline batteries in a holder without problems.
So I suppose the system got a last minute pardon Just need to add an internal CDROM drive then I'll button it up.

[Vorticon]

Is there any significant advantage to installing DOS 6.22 over DOS 5.0? I found install disks for the former...

[Trixter]

The built-in utilities (mem.exe, etc.) are slightly better in 6.x than 5.x. Then again, 5.x takes up less space (the extra stuff in 6.x is mostly of benefit to 286+ systems). So it's a matter of preference. I run PC DOS 2000 (IBM PC DOS 7.0, essentially) on mine.