Need to Help on a Special Case: Dual Boot/Dual HardDrive

[Nathan123]

Yo Guys, Need Help on this setup: My customer wants to use an old 486clipper(DbaseIII) program in Dos mode, How can I use the program with his new computer running WinXP. Option #1 I can remove the old HardDrive from her Old 486(Still running) Computer and Put it in her new Computer and create a dual boot, one will boot to XP the other will boot to the old Harddrive(How can I do This and is it possible?) Option #2 I can copy all the file from the old harddrive to the new computer and run it from there but it keeps giving me an error, What can you guys suggest?

Knowledge is a gift from God sharing it with friends and strangers, make you a better person, inside and outside.

 

[tomaso11]

Your olde worlde drive probably uses fat16 and xp usually runs NTFS but I think Boot Magic (comes bundled with Partition Magic) will do it for you.

 

[BadBigBen]

Hi there,

1.) you could make a Dual Boot System, using Win98SE (as this still is a DOS based OS) to run the DBASEIII and on another Drive use WinXP for rest work... just a thought... as XP does not like DOS progies to well (there is a way but unfortunately I don't know it)

2.) you could build a LINUX system with a DOS Emulator to run the DBASEIII software, as this OS can read/write a multitude of FileSystems out there, including FAT12/FAT16/FAT32/NTFS (all Microsoft natives), MAC-HPFS, FFS (AmigaOS native), and a splew of others native to LINUX and a few obscure OS's...

@tomaso11 - you're wrong about the 'Olde Worlde Drive' using fat16, I believe it uses still FAT12, and your are wrong about XP usually running NTFS, XP runs either FAT32 or NTFS, but reads FAT16 partitions only...

Ben

If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer...

 

[dakota81]

BigBadBen - sorry to say, MS-DOS 5 and 6 gave users only one option, FAT16.

I'd try and get the contents of the old harddrive onto a FAT16 partition on the new harddrive for the simple reason of, if the program is that valuable to build a special boot system around, you don't want to leave it on an old drive.

The harddrive shouldn't be a cause for a program to not work though, if you can't get the program to run on the new drive, you're probably going to have the same problems with the old drive (meaning it's an incompatibility between the software & some other hardware component).