Christmas Quiz :-))

[BOAC]

For the 'older' experts!

I have always kept a skeleton Win3.1 on drive D, so I could boot from a floppy into it whenever Win 95/98 crashed horribly. This way I had a mouse/GUI file handling system to sort it out- and it saved my bacon many times.

I am now running a much more stable W2000 Pro, with FAT32. Yesterday (foolish me!) I decided to reinstall 3.1 in the same position. I now cannot run it - getting a message that I have the wrong DOS. The floppy was a boot disk made from W98 and USED TO WORK for 3.1.

Can anyone help please with:

Which DOS DO I need?

How do I get hold of it?

[ck4707]

BOAC

Try here (www.bootdisk.com)

Hope this helps

CK

[BOAC]

ck - many thanks - now face with a bewildering choice of DOS's :eek:

Any idea which one I should make a floppy boot disk from?

[ck4707]

Last time I used Win 3.1 (many moons ago!) It was installed over DOS 6.
I seem to recall DOS 6 came on three 1.4Mb floppies.

Hope this helps

CK

[BOAC]

Many thanks again - downloading furiously!

[BOAC]

Oh dear! Totally lost here. Downloaded and made floppies for 5 6 and 6.22. None will recognise drives other than A:

Downloaded 'Freedos' and floppied it. Win 3.1 starts but I get a clash with emm386 message.

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

BOAC,

Most Mobos and Hard Drives are not Win98 compatible, much less DOS compatible. With the latest Hardware, you will find that they exceed the limitations of Hard Drive Size and with objects like USB, just not compatible.

With WinXP out, there is no need to go back to DOS. I would not bother to keep Win3.1 or Win3.11 around any more.

Now any DOS 5.xx or higher will work with Win3.1/3.11.

Take Care,

Richard

[ck4707]

BOAC

Sorry, been out all day.

If memory serves correctly, DOS 6.22 supports Windows for Workgroups, i.e. a networkable version. DOS 6.0 is the same minus the network (peer to peer stuff).

Again, strecthing my memory, I think DOS 6.xx only supports upto 1.9Gb. You may have to partion your drive to a value less than this.

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

ck4707,

Is the one where they removed DoubleSpace under court order back in Feb. 1994. (Sound familiar to what has been going on ever since?) :eek:

Take Care,

Richard

[BOAC]

I think I will bite the bullet and forget 3.11 after all that, taking NAC's advice. Seems a shame to close down a long-serving aide, but W2000 has been pretty reliable and NAC says XP is better, and this DOS thing is 'doin' me heed in'.

Thanks all.

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

BOAC,

With NTFS, you get better security and very good Drive Utilities. There is little to no reason to go back to FAT32 and the days of DOS.

Take Care,

Richard

[ck4707]

BOAC

Must say that I have to agree with Richard on this one.

I used to like WIN 3.x but we must move on and accept newer and better (???????????) improvements !

There are loads of utilities that you can download to start your computer if your installed version of Windows goes t*ts up !

CK

[BOAC]

Thanks again guys: I've only just plucked up courage to remove the dual-boot W98 from my machine, so maybe it is time to lose the security blanket and remove W3.1 :eek:

One Q if I may - if I go over to NTFS, do I need to reformat and/or reinstall stuff?

Best wishes to all for the season's festivities and thanks for the year-long support!

[gizmocat]

You can convert from FATxx to NTFS on the fly. (you cannot convert back) It will rebuild the file system next time you reboot. There is a restriction in so far as there must be enough free space on the partitions you are converting. If it is too small it will tell you so it's pretty foolproof.

CONVERT volume /FS:NTFS [/V] [/CvtArea:filename] [/NoSecurity] [/X]

volume Specifies the drive letter (followed by a colon),
mount point, or volume name.
/FS:NTFS Specifies that the volume is to be converted to NTFS.
/V Specifies that Convert should be run in verbose mode.
/CvtArea:filename
Specifies a contiguous file in the root directory to be
the place holder for NTFS system files.
/NoSecurity Specifies the converted files and directories security
settings to be accessible by everyone.
/X Forces the volume to dismount first if necessary.
All opened handles to the volume would then be invalid.

So you would type in at a dos prompt :-

"convert c: /FS:NTFS"

Bests
Martin