Should I install win2k?

[GruntWageSlave]

Here's the sad sorry story...

I was happily co-existing with NT4 Sp6a Workstation for about the last
4 years but then the wife bought a digital camera and as we all know
the USB is not supported by NT. I had an upgrade-to-Win2k CD that I
received when I purchased NT back in 1999/2000 so I installed or tried
to install) Win2K from that. After problems of not finding this and
that driver and not being able to read from my main CDROM unit and a
horrible experience of replacing my laboriously-downloaded IE6 with
IE5.4 (obviously they don't check!) I finally reached the blue screen
of death (several times) with "Fatal System Error...[blah blah]".
Great! Now what the f... do I do?

Well, my machine had a 466mhz processor and 128M of memory and no
possibility of upgrade and I'd seen these 2+ gig machines with gobs of
memory and other good things at a great price so... well, it's a good
excuse. I went out and bought one pre-loaded with Win XP Home.

Great, at least I have no installation worries now and the biggest
problem is re-installing my old software and trying to eliminate the
baby talk. But then disaster again struck in the form of a set of
programs written for MS-DOS 6.2 and used by myself daily which now
won't run under XP (they run fine under NT and Win2K). I'd understand
the punishment if these were game programs or similar frivolity but
they just manipulate text and massive indexed files. No direct machine
instructions: everything done through OS calls.

Well, I could kill XP and re-install NT4 and then SP6a and then the
Win2K upgrade but that's a huge amount of work and I'm now dealing
with a machine which is up to date and a version of the OS that is 4
years old. I would imagine that almost nothing on the machine has
drivers. Did they even have a DVD ROM back in those days? I'm sure
that Win2k SP4 has all that's necessary but getting there will be a
real problem.

Or I could install Win2K from scratch eliminating the NT4 and NT4 SP6a
dance but despite a menu item on the installation disk of "Install
Windows 2000 Professional" the outside of the CD is clearly marked
"Upgrade" so presumably it will check that there's at least something
of NT4 on the machine (anyone know what?).

Or maybe I should learn Linux <g>...

Does anyone have an views on what I should do?

 

[DL]

Assuming the old NT4 m/c; you can boot from the win2k disk and install, if
it states cannot find qualifying product, pop yr NT disk in the cd, point to
it, then continue installation.
Win2k is hardware picky, you should ensure yr hardware supports it,
particularly graphics card. If neccessary disconect any 'extra' hardware.

 

[Gary Smith]

But then disaster again struck in the form of a set of
programs written for MS-DOS 6.2 and used by myself daily which now
won't run under XP (they run fine under NT and Win2K). I'd understand
the punishment if these were game programs or similar frivolity but
they just manipulate text and massive indexed files. No direct machine
instructions: everything done through OS calls.

If your DOS programs ran under NT and 2K, they ought to run under XP. I
seem to recall XP being touted as *more* capable of running DOS programs
than 2K is. What happens when you try to run them?

 

[GruntWageSlave]

If your DOS programs ran under NT and 2K, they ought to run under XP. I
seem to recall XP being touted as *more* capable of running DOS programs
than 2K is. What happens when you try to run them?

Here's what I posted on the XP newsgroup a couple of days ago. Other
than suggesting Virtual PC no one had any ideas. I have another
thought at the end.

*****begin extract

I have a large number of legacy (i.e. old) MS-DOS programs constructed
back in the eighties and early nineties which are absolutely
essential. A rewrite would cost around two man years and really big
bucks for the compiler so that's not an option.

But I did do some homework. I have a test program called
"MD11xxxx.EXE" (the "xxxx" will be explained in a moment) which is a
simple "Hello world" type program. In MS-DOS 5.2 the dialog would be
(user actions and explanations in square brackets):

C> [Presuming the MD11xxxx.EXE is on the root directory of C:]
C> [user enters] MD11xxxx
Sucess MD11 Started - Press Enter to Terminate [MD11xxxx displays on
console]
[user presses enter]
MD11 ended [MD11xxxx displays on console]
C>

That's it! Very simple!

The "xxxx" is "PROT" or "REAL"; they're functionally identical and at
the source code level word-for-word identical. If it's MD11PROT the
program uses DPMI memory and can run in up to 16 meg of memory. If
it's MD11REAL it runs in real memory (below 640K). This has nothing to
do with any options chosen in the properties box; the programs are
compiled, link-edited, and then bound to a stub loader which
determines its memory use (this last step is the only difference). I
don't really understand this but I could pull out and quote from the
manual if it would help. The point is that while MD11REAL is only 38K
and MD11PROT is 92K (i.e. both should be able to run in a 256K (that's
K not M) machine) some of the other programs are much larger and must
run in protected mode only.

Under MS-DOS the programs ran as above using full screen. IIRC under
Win 3.1 they ran either in a DOS window or full screen depending on
your use of ALT-ENTER. Same in NT4. Both ran in a box or if you really
wanted to you could go to full screen. The norm was a box. Prior to
conversion to Win2K I had my son test them on his Win2K machines, both
a notebook and the desktop at work, and both the PROT and REAL
versions ran just as they did in NT4. Well, because of the disaster in
installing Win2K on my machine I didn't test on an XP machine and
bingo, they don't work! Well, REAL sort of works, but PROT doesn't
work at all.

For REAL, either double click on the file name, or enter it in the run
box, and the whole screen immediately goes black, and then after a
couple of heart-stopping moments, the correct dialog appears. I can
continue in full screen or use ALT-ENTER to go to a standard DOS box.
Either way an ENTER produces the appropriate "ended" message. It
doesn't seem to matter what folder I run it from and the Properties
Screen Usage button makes no difference either way. Nor does the
setting of the Run parameter on the Program screen-- it currently says
"minimized" but it doesn't matter what I change it to. Running in
compatibility mode for any of the four optional systems has absolutely
no effect either.

With PROT the settings in the properties screens have no effect at all
(same as for REAL) nor do the parameters I enter for memory (do it
intelligently or make them up at random -- I might as well save the
wear-and-tear on my fingers). The behavior is slightly different
though. It does open a DOS box but if you blink you'll miss it.
Without any user intervention, the box expands to cover the entire
screen and it becomes black (you actually see it rise up). Then
there's a couple of seconds delay and then the desktop reappears as
though nothing had happened. No wording, nothing.

As a matter of interest my other son runs Win 98 SE so I had him try
them out. It works (or actually doesn't) the same as XP with the
slight variance that in PROT mode, after the blanking (or black-ing)
of the screen it waits. If you do nothing I presume it would just
continue forever but if you hit enter as you would normally it returns
to a normal DOS box, the heading of which says "MD11PROT Finished" but
there's no text in the box itself.

My guess is that between NT/Win2K and the XP family they've changed
the way they handle the console which is what I'm writing to. How do I
get it back to the way it was under NT?

*****end extract

In the meantime I've searched MS's knowledge base and followed the
suggestions except for the one which says "Contact the manufacturer"
because that's me <g>. Of course I don't know if the program is using
a block device or any of the exception interrupts but I think I would
see the same behavior in NT and XP if it were.

The only other variation is that my new machine has a much faster
processor and a fast video card. Is it possible that there's a speed
(too much) problem? I think I'm clutching at straws though because the
notebook running Win2K that the test programs run fine on is pretty
modern -- maybe nine months old -- and almost certainly has the best
of the best speed wise. Still it seems strange that the game-oriented
home type OS's have the problem and the business ones don't.

 

[Gary Smith]

[description snipped]

The only other variation is that my new machine has a much faster
processor and a fast video card. Is it possible that there's a speed
(too much) problem? I think I'm clutching at straws though because the
notebook running Win2K that the test programs run fine on is pretty
modern -- maybe nine months old -- and almost certainly has the best
of the best speed wise. Still it seems strange that the game-oriented
home type OS's have the problem and the business ones don't.

Well, I'm stumped. I don't have a suggstion, and I don't have XP to
experiment with.

 

[GruntWageSlave]

OK guys, the problem is with the machine itself, not the OS so
changing to Win2K (or Linux) wouldn't solve the problem. Here's an
explanation I posted in the XP group.

******begin extract

OK guys, Bill is off the hook. I booted real 6.2 DOS from diskette on
the machine that runs XP normally and the two test programs mentioned
below have similar problems. MD11REAL runs but MD11PROT displays a
screen of various colors and a stepped "!" across and down its full
length. It then hangs the machine. Further investigation disclosed
that MD11 (either one) use direct memory mapping for the video which
means that anything can happen. However the compiler mfg realized this
might cause problems and included the option of linking in a module
which causes only BIOS calls to be made. I recompiled and link-edited
with the instructions not to use video memory mapping and SUCCESS! The
two programs run perfectly (under command prompt) just as they did
under NT4.

Unfortunately the solution only works for the simple test programs;
for the real processing I use a screen generator whose library is
included at linkedit time. That screen generator requires
memory-mapped video and so we're almost back to square one. The only
saving grace is that it lets me down gently with a run time error
indicating that I can't use BIOS memory calls. Yuk!

Now it becomes an investigation of the various video adaptors to see
where they load. I'm currently running an S3 Pro Savage and the Win 98
machine was also a S3 Savage adapter; the NT machine was running a
Matrox GE Force G400 MX and I'm awaiting information as to the machine
running Win2K.

So wherever the Matrox adapter loads itself doesn't cause a conflict
but of course this board is four years old and a little unreliable. I
need to find out where direct-mapped video (from my legacy programs)
loads and where any potential video adapter loads. Can I manipulate
these memory addresses (see Device Manager|Resources) and if so how?
Well... it's no longer a question for an OS group so I'll leave you in
peace.

********end extract

Here's the sad sorry story...

I was happily co-existing with NT4 Sp6a Workstation for about the last
4 years but then the wife bought a digital camera and as we all know
the USB is not supported by NT. I had an upgrade-to-Win2k CD that I
received when I purchased NT back in 1999/2000 so I installed or tried
to install) Win2K from that. After problems of not finding this and
that driver and not being able to read from my main CDROM unit and a
horrible experience of replacing my laboriously-downloaded IE6 with
IE5.4 (obviously they don't check!) I finally reached the blue screen
of death (several times) with "Fatal System Error...[blah blah]".
Great! Now what the f... do I do?

Well, my machine had a 466mhz processor and 128M of memory and no
possibility of upgrade and I'd seen these 2+ gig machines with gobs of
memory and other good things at a great price so... well, it's a good
excuse. I went out and bought one pre-loaded with Win XP Home.

Great, at least I have no installation worries now and the biggest
problem is re-installing my old software and trying to eliminate the
baby talk. But then disaster again struck in the form of a set of
programs written for MS-DOS 6.2 and used by myself daily which now
won't run under XP (they run fine under NT and Win2K). I'd understand
the punishment if these were game programs or similar frivolity but
they just manipulate text and massive indexed files. No direct machine
instructions: everything done through OS calls.

Well, I could kill XP and re-install NT4 and then SP6a and then the
Win2K upgrade but that's a huge amount of work and I'm now dealing
with a machine which is up to date and a version of the OS that is 4
years old. I would imagine that almost nothing on the machine has
drivers. Did they even have a DVD ROM back in those days? I'm sure
that Win2k SP4 has all that's necessary but getting there will be a
real problem.

Or I could install Win2K from scratch eliminating the NT4 and NT4 SP6a
dance but despite a menu item on the installation disk of "Install
Windows 2000 Professional" the outside of the CD is clearly marked
"Upgrade" so presumably it will check that there's at least something
of NT4 on the machine (anyone know what?).

Or maybe I should learn Linux <g>...

Does anyone have an views on what I should do?