BB FANS

Hi,

I been having fun with this old PC.

First problem was that it 130MB hard drive keeps stopping !
Now the board only support a P75 and the Bios didn't like drives from the last 10 years !

First solution was to dig out by P1 233 board and processor that I'd been keeping for a rainy day. Then the Bios wouldn't recognise the drive due to it being over 2.1GB. But I found data to change the jumpers on the drive to reduce it to 2.1GB.
This worked I have two partitions on it and formatted.

Next headache is transferring the operating system.

The owner has Stacker installed and use SSwap.com so your running off I think a RAM drive ? A new drive is created at boot-up and drive C is swapped with it. So when running the hard-drive is Drive F.

So the question is if I clone drive F to the bootable 1st partition of the new drive (Currently drive D) will the system work ?

Drive C looks like a normal drive but the volume name says Stacker and there's no serial number. And checking the hard-drive reveals one partition using 100% of the drive hence why I suspect a RAM drive though considering the low amount of memory there shouldn't be enough to load the image into. This is why I'm a bit puzzled to how this works.

Anybody remember back to DOS days ? And can enlighten .

I manually transfered the stacker drive C to drive D before it registered that I'd transferred the wrong drive.
Drive C has a total of 164857309 bytes used with 79405056 bytes free which is about twice the size of the hard-drive. Where as drive F The hard-drive when swapped has 899462 Bytes used with 446464 Bytes free.

I've now found some software that should make the next transfer much easier and quicker.

Still need to know if I'm correct in going for the other drive and the rest should appear ?

For the non-PC techies this'll sound like a foreign language but this was the technology back in the early 90's. And the programs the own uses don't work under the later Operating systems and he prefers the older versions to the newer ones as they are more friendly.

I've got the bootable utility cd running and have a program called xxcopy (16bit) running which should be cloning drive C to drive D.

It's just copied the Stack drive image and has burst into life with file names scrolling.

In fact it says it's finished. And the Bytes used matches drive C.

Time to swop some cables and see if it really has worked.

You lost me about the second para. Larry


Maybe these will help

Sorry, couldn't resist it

It's heading that way very quickly !

I've now found 2 cloning programs that appear to work but the drive won't boot correctly.

Just used Norton Ghost after booting from it's CD but it goes through the process correctly until it gets to the end of the system checks then something appears in hyraclifics with a flashing cursor. Both drives are formatted FAT16 the system files have been copied but it does boot to DOS5. I'm beginning to loose hope of getting the system working.

It looks like it's before config.sys has a chance to activate stacker so I can't blame that or is it ? There are a couple of lines that don't show anything that might have something to do with it.... maybe.

Time for food before I put the old drive back in AGAIN !
Think I'll have to tell them it can't be done.
I don't like being defeated.

I need help understanding the title!

From my PM the other day I think it's fair to say you know that I'm nae going to be any help but good luck with it, if anybody here could sort out the problem I'm sure it'd be you.

Well I've tried everything I can think of and nothing is working.
I read that DOS has to be within the first 512MB for the hard-drive so I've deleted all the Partitions then redone it creating 4 logical drives with a max size of 512MB according to FDISK but 513MB according to the Format command.

I'm sure I've over looked something as I have a PC in the loft with a 1GB drive with a single partition that works fine with DOS6.22 and Wins 3.11

Food is getting cold.

OK I've cheated !

The strange message that was unreadable was asking for a boot-disk which if I used a Floppy disk then booted off that.
So I had an idea ,I took an image file of a MS-DOS 5.00 boot-disk and added the Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files from the hard-drive.
Next I used Nero to create a bootable CD and added the rest of the files from the Hard-drive to the CD.

It works !

Booted straight up loaded all the extras it usually does swapped drives and started Windows 3.11.

So it looks like either something is wrong with the boot sector of the drive or it becomes corrupt ?

Booting it from CD might not be the ideal thing but it works. I'll get the owner to put it through it's paces.

Now I've got to bolt it back together and return it in the morning.

They really must find a way to update the PC with some new technology before they loose their work.

slight floor in the last plan as it was booting of the cd contents and not the hard-drive !

Solution a floppy disk to boot off.

So I'm down to installing the serial port update so the mouse works in Windows 3.11.

Does anybody know how to use Stacker ?
I need to extract one of the images to a physical drive so I can transfer the files to a new system.

I have another PC which is going to get a fresh installation of DOS6.22 then Windows 3.11 then the software they use then I'm going to upgrade it to Windows 95 and hopefully it'll still work.

This other PC is an AMD 550MHz with 32MB RAM and a 3.5GB drive. The drives going to have to have a minimum of 2 partitions to overcome the 2.1GB limit of FAT16. But as I explained to them technology is leaving their old software behind and there is going to come a time very shortly where it won't be compatible with available hardware.

Anybody know how to use Stacker 4.0 or where I can download instructions ?

The progress so far.

The first upgrade had to be reversed as I couldn't get the mouse to work no matter what I tried.

The second machine is taking shape.
So far I've installed and configured MS-DOS 7.1.
Then I installed Windows For Workgroups 3.11.
I then added CorelDraw 4 as it turned out that the version 3 CD was MAC and not PC.

I had some problems installing Signwizard as it kept saying files were missing on the disks. I even had the disks on CD which I know has worked before and they kept reporting the missing files .

But I should have the expanded image on another drive from which I can copy the other stuff and the missing files to manually install the rest.

If that proves a problem then I somehow have to expand a Stacker disc image without installing Stacker which if I do install it will compress the drive which I don't want. In the old days with very small hard-drives this was the cheapest way to gain more space. EG the old drive in the other PC is only 130MB but the one in the new PC has two 1.7GB partitions.
Plus I have my doubts if stacker will work correctly with MS-DOS 7.1 (see Internet references to MS and tactics used against Stacker and other add-on programs for DOS and 16bit windows. Including the court case Stacker won against MS).

Hopefully I can get this finished before the old drive stops spinning permanently.

The other strange thing is that I had a working bootable CD image of the old drive which now refuses to run.