legacy OS on new PCs

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

I have a smaller 6-gig drive upon which I wanted to run a legacy program. That legacy program wants DOS, native or that which is available under Win95 will do. I own licensed copies of both.

I used my boot disk for DOS 6.22 to start the computer (& not some boot disk from Win98 cause the dos is different and not downward compatible).

The drive got an FDISK and I formatted it.

When I try to load the Dos 6.22 ( not run but load) I get an error message that says that the program is too big for the memory.
That's not an accurate error message. The RAM memory is One Gig. So there's plenty. And it's only DOS 6.22. I used to run that on a 450 Meg hard drive with a whole Meg of memory . Woo Hoo~!!

While attempting to run ( after a successful load) Win95 I get an error message that says:

"Insufficient memory to initialize windows.
quit one or more memory resident programs or remove unnecessary utilities from your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files, and restart your computer

Press any key to continue . . . "

And then the system shuts off when I hit any key.

There is no autoexec or config file. There is a COMMAND.COM file which I renamed to take it out of the loop. When I tried to re-boot after that, the system offered the "6 boot options" ranging from "SAFE MODE" to "SAFE MODE COMMAND PROMPT ONLY"

In SAFE MODE or BOOTLOGGED it presents me the same error message.

In BOOTLOGGED MODE
It fails when I respond YES to the message:
"Load all Windows Drivers [Enter=Y, Esc=N] ?"

I am thinking that I may have a hardware problem.

Will DOS and Win95 run on a newer power supply type mother board? The type that shuts down based on a software command?

What are the RAM thresholds that may be difficult for DOS and Win95 to live with~? Should I yank a memory card?

Any ideas?

[Jim Becker]

It's likely that the old DOS doesn't understand the new, larger memory map that your current hardware has. Hence, the "not enough memory" error. You may need to us virtual machine software to do a "virtual DOS machine" to run your old software. That should work as long as the program doesn't break the rules and try to access hardware directly...unfortunately, all too common years ago.

[Nathan Camp]

You can download Microsoft Virtual Machine for free or but VM Ware. Both allow you to run older operating systems. On my Vista laptop, I can run DOS, NT, XP, and Server 2003.

With your setup, I do not believe DOS would handle a 6 gig drive. I know NT (Pre service pack 5 or 6) would only handle 4 gig. It may be that your dos is loading too many drivers. Check the config.sys and autoexec.bat on your boot drive.

Nathan

[Greg Peterson]

Cliff, if my recollection serves me correctly, you need to tell Win95/DoS about memory settings.

These settings should be in your CONFIG.SYS file:

DEVICE=HI-MEM.SYS
DEVICE=EMM386-.EXE NOEMS
DOS=UMB
DOS=HIGH

You can also google DoS HI memory.

[Rich Engelhardt]

Hello Cliff,
Nathan has the right idea.
Download Microsoft Virtual PC.
You can run almost anything inside it.
I run Win 2000, Win98 and Dos on my XP Pro laptop.

The nice thing about the virtual environment is you can size your "machine" to fit the program(s) you want to run, and then when you shut it down, you simply copy the entire virtual off as one big file for backup.

[Randal Stevenson]

If I remember correctly, their last dos only, had a 512mb limit.

You might look up Freedos, and give it a shot.