DOS in XP Pro

[nhtraven]

Hi all

I am having a problem when in DOS on a windows XP PRO machine. For some reason i cannot access COM port thru the DOS window.

Any help would be appreciated.

Raven

 

[bcastner]

Be a little more specific about what you need hardware access to the COM port for, and what specific device.

Generally speaking, direct hardware writes/reads will not be possible without an intermediary: a virtualization device driver.

If you give details on the make, model, and/or software requiring access it would help use a lot to answer your question.

 

[nhtraven]

Software is an in-house proprietary test program that needs to gain access to COM1 to get info from the equipment under test. Software was written in assembler and makes calls directly to the port.

 

[bcastner]

It will never work under XP unless you rewrite using the COM services under the C, VC or other libraries.

In this case do not upgrade the workstation to XP.

One way of dealing with the serial ports is to use the MSComm control shipped with Visual C++.

Another is to write a class for dealing with the COM ports. You can find an example of the latter in the

http://www.codeguru.com/

web site.

 

[jfp23]

You can setup the machine to dual boot dos and windows xp pro, so that you can boot into dos when you need to do your hardware testing.