Luckily I have found an direct download of Ghost.exe (DOS-version of Ghost11) Download HERE Put this file to folder disk1 in EasyBoot and follow guidelines in post nr;2 (skip step 9 as you now already have ghost.exe in folder disk1). This was the home page for Ghostscript, an interpreter for the PostScript language and for PDF, and related software and documentation. Linux and Apple OS X; Ghostgum GSview 5 - an old previewer for MS-Windows. Contact Ghostgum Software epstool for adding and removing DOS EPS. Last update 2018-08-11.
MS-DOS 5 introduced numerous new features and was a flagship release for Microsoft. A full screen text editor EDIT has replaced the former line editor EDLIN supplied since the early days of DOS. Microsoft QBasic also shipped in DOS 5 replacing GW-BASIC.
MS-DOS 5 also supported 2.88MB 3.5' floppy disks as well as hard disks up to 2GB in size. The memory management was rewritten to allow DOS to utilize the High Memory Area and Upper Memory Area to reduce its usage of conventional memory. Numerous bugs were noticed shortly after launch which lead to the 5.0a update.
This release of DOS was the last of the collaboration between Microsoft and IBM and as a result will be the last result where PC-DOS and MS-DOS are near-identical. This was also the version of DOS used in the OS/2 and Windows NT virtual DOS machine. When MS-DOS 5 was released the entire market had become dominated by IBM and compatible systems, so specific OEM versions of DOS for machines not using an IBM BIOS were not shipped as in prior releases. Installation instructions To Install: Insert the first disk into your PC or virtualization software and ensure your BIOS is set to boot from a floppy disk. The setup program will install and ask a few questions about your hardware and whether or not you want to install to floppy or hard disk. Applications will be installed into C: DOS unless changed in setup.
I am a partner for a small business that uses three, 25-year-old 486 era PCs. We had a program designed for us by a start-up tech company in Okeechobee, Florida back in the 80's that we have used to account for daily files, act as a POS system, etc. Amazingly it has been exceptionally accurate and we have no plans to change. However, we have no more copies of this specific program.
We have used the same HDD's for years now, and one has been on its last leg because you can hear the spindles grinding and slower respone. Unfortunately after a minor mishap of bumping the computer tower over from one of my employees (insert angry face and curse words) one of the HDD's bit the dust and now we are needing to clone one of the other computers.
I do not have any DOS cd's, nor am I able to use a USB, CD or floppy. Many of these old towers have lost the functionality of booting from floppy and none have USB. I am needing to find a program or figure out a way that I can safely plug a new HDD to one of the working 486's, clone every last bit of information, remove it, and be able to move it over to my new one.
I'm pretty familiar with PCs and the old bios mainframe and what not. Additionally, I was able to get a backup copy of the DOS program that we use and have it saved on a folder on my desktop. I of course attempted to merge the files saved on my desktop from the old one that died to the replacement one, however I get an error message so obviously it is not booting correctly. Any help is greatly appreciated. Dos is easy, just take a new drive (or better yet a or CF card and adapter) and install it in one of the working machines. Boot the machine, then use FDISK to create a 2 GB active partition on the DOM, reboot again.
Then format it (format d: /s - the /s is very important, it will copy the system files over to the thing and make it bootable). Once done simply just copy all the files and folders over. Lookup how to use Xcopy to copy everything, and that will do it. Another option is to use a IDE to CF adapter like this which can be mounted in an external 3.5' bay and give you easy access to the CF card.
Then if you need to make a backup of the thing you can just shut it down and easily plug it into a modern machine and either make an image or copy the stuff off of it. Keep in mind your BIOS in those old machines will more than likely top out at 8Gb in HDD size, and DOS can only handle up to a 2Gb partition. This is why using a CF card adapter is ideal, it is easy to find sub 10Gb CF cards, but not so easy to find spindle drives in that size. Plus the added performance from using a solid state drive in the machine is a nice bonus. Merryworks wrote: You may also want to look at getting a professional IT person to make the old system a virtual machine that you can run on newer equipment.
The problem is that most DOS applications expect direct access to the hardware in order to do what they need to do. If the OPs machine have some sort of customized required hardware (ISA card, serial/parallel licence key etc) then virtualization is very near impossible. If, however, it's just a DOS program, the take a look at DOS box, and give it a try with the application in question, this would allow you to run the app on any modern OS and hardware, through parallel printing might be a challenge (but not impossible). Zachsirmons wrote: I'm pretty familiar with PCs and the old bios mainframe and what not. Additionally, I was able to get a backup copy of the DOS program that we use and have it saved on a folder on my desktop. I of course attempted to merge the files saved on my desktop from the old one that died to the replacement one, however I get an error message so obviously it is not booting correctly. Any help is greatly appreciated.So did you just grab a copy of the folder that the application is in?
How about the autoexec.bat and config.sys in the root if the drive? And any executables and what not that are called in the startup files (autoexec.bat and config.sys). Also, what version of DOS is it?
Type ver at the prompt to get this. I have several DOS machines myself, and have been using DOS consistently since the late 80s, so PM me if you need more help that this, or don't want to post info publically. What I did was I plugged in the working DOS HDD into a working desktop (this one happens to be XP) and I could view the files and folders that way. The software is using something called DATAFLEX. I could see autoexec.bat and I saw a couple more in there.
The working DOS HDD and programs are using MS-DOS 6.22 - not that this is any help but I have no earthly idea how to do the syntax or anything for copying them over. I actually have to make two copies of this hard drive. I have two spare hard drives here and I just have to make exact images of the working DOS hard drive onto those. For the Active@ disk image, do I run this on my XP computer and just connect/disconnect the working HDD + replacements when prompted? JRC- I would appreciate any help - you're welcome to email me!. I do plan on getting this replaced eventually into virtual machines - very shortly. Great DOS advice.
Should be easy to format the new drive (format /s) and that will put the system files on it in the right place. Then, it's just a file copy. The easiest way would be to add the hard drive to an existing system and format it there. If it's MS-DOS, you just need 3 files: MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS, and COMMAND.COM. Do you have a floppy with 6.22 on it? If not, you can create one easily.
Put it in a working machine, then format a: /s copy format.exe a: Then, change the hard drive out for a blank one. Boot off the floppy and format c: /sys from the floppy. You don't need to clone the DOS drive, just a simple file copy.
Robert5205 wrote: Great DOS advice. Should be easy to format the new drive (format /s) and that will put the system files on it in the right place.
Then, it's just a file copy. The easiest way would be to add the hard drive to an existing system and format it there.
If it's MS-DOS, you just need 3 files: MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS, and COMMAND.COM. Do you have a floppy with 6.22 on it? If not, you can create one easily.
Put it in a working machine, then format a: /s copy format.exe a: Then, change the hard drive out for a blank one. Boot off the floppy and format c: /sys from the floppy. You don't need to clone the DOS drive, just a simple file copy. Make sure to unplug the existing OS disk BEFORE booting from the floppy and typing format C: Here be dragons.;). DOS programs look at the files on the HDD, and don't rely on a registry to hold any config-information. So copying the folder that contains the program may well already be enough. It is possible the program has config files or hard-coded references to a specific folder on the drive tho, so be sure to copy the folder and it's structure exactly to the new drive.
Other than that, keep an eye on the aforementioned config.sys and autoexec.bat which control the system-environment mostly. It could be they set variables that the program may need, allow for memory above the 640kB boundary to be allocated and the like. Since you have your disk attached to the XP PC, boot the XP PC with a bootable floppy or CD, run ghost, acronis or any other imaging/clone program of your likings, select the disc to image, image to disc, store it to your XP machine's drive and once finished attach an empty drive and restore the newly created image to that disk. It sounds easy, and if you done it a few times it is, but be carefull overwriteng the wrong disk doesn't help you at all:) if you simply want to create a copy to a USB stick (even if you just can't copy it easily back since the 486 era has no USB) format a USB stick to fat / fat32 and simply copy all on the harddive with explorer. Somewhere on the attic i still have a Plugger (Parrallel port harddrive) with a humongoous 800 MB, which i used far back in the previous century to backup this kind of machines. But you still need a floppy drive to boot the drivers for such a device.
To make the new partition bootable you need the SYS.COM program from the old DOS copy. Also note that DOS 6 can only understands FAT16 partitions. FAT32 came in with the version of DOS 7 in Windows 95.The majority of DOS software will run under DOS 7, and that gives the advantage of much larger partitions. (in theory up to a terabyte or two, although it gets very inefficient at those sizes) For your purposes it may be unnecessary though. One way of transferring the partition complete is with gparted under Knoppix. To do this you'd need a computer with an IDE port and a CD/DVD drive.
You could also use Drive Image XML under Windows, provided the Windows computer has an IDE port of course. You can also get IDE-to-SATA adapters on Ebay, if your new computers don't have IDE. Using DIXML you could then create a backup copy of the partition which would be handy for future issues.
Plus, this way you only need to connect one IDE drive at a time which saves all those master/slave issues. Just as an aside those 486 PC's aren't going to work for ever either. I can't imagine trying to find spare parts for these now as most are museum pieces - however kudos to you for having them!
Did you not have the source code in an escrow agreement? This has been pretty standard practice for years - essentially the supplier should provide the source code and the means to re-compile it and this should be lodged with an independent third party. As a developer in the 90's that was pretty standard practice. However I agree with the above if you can get it virtualised then that is the cheapest approach. Other than that there are 2 other potential routes: Move to a new backoffice/POS system - most are based around standard windows PC's - you just need a touchscreen, barcode scanner and scales for a full featured system. A decent supplier should be able to extract and import the data from the legacy system.
Older languages - as long as we know what it was written in - and if it was late 1980's then it's possibly a DBASE program - can normally be de-compiled as most suppliers didn't protect their source code properly. You could then get an old-school contractor to convert this to a modern language. Good luck - I used to relish the challenge of getting data out of old systems. As Chris6966 and ita-tomi have said. Despite the 25 yr old software working fine - the hardware won't continue operating as you are now experiencing if the software is tied to the hardware then you need a new system no way around it.
If you can virtualise the environment well and good. But you really need to think that you've done well getting 25years use out of your initial investment in the software. That's five times longer than a normal software lifecycle. Start now while it's not a critical issue (i.e your business is still functioning) complete failure will leave you in a position where you can't trade at all. Chris6966 has made some good suggestions take it from there. If the program is 16 bit and runs purely in DOS just copy the program folder to the new installation. The old 16 bit software was usually self contained and will be easily copyable as a whole.
If it relied on security dongles you may have an issue. I would expect you could run the program under something like dosbox and probably don't need to clone the entire drive. You should be able to pull the files using an IDE adapter, or an old external HDD enclosure.
Failing that, serial to serial transfer could be possible. I used to use laplink in the old days. Those old 486 motherboards should have two IDE ports. The thing to remember was that you were allowed two IDE devices per port. Your typical IDE cable will have three places to plug stuff into. One for the motherboard port, and then two other places for two more devices.
They are keyed with a little tab of plastic and you cannot plug them in the wrong way. Well, you can but you'll end up damaging/modifying the cables por pins.:) Just hook up a second drive to the second IDE port and you should have another hard drive to copy the program over to. Usually in those days the jumpers for each drive would be set to Cable Select. So, you could have your boot drive and a CD-ROM on the same cable. Or two drives on that cable. Then which ever drive was plugged into the last port became the primary drive, IE the one the machine would try to boot up to.
Alternatively, one drive may be jump-ered as Master and the other one would be jumpered as the slave. EDIT: Cut my IT teeth on this technology, PM me if you need more help.