# dos 5.0 and win 3.1



## starrekin61 (Dec 2, 2004)

hi. am trying to make a decent system out of two old dinosaurs and my extra parts. 
first system is running dos 5.0 and (supposedly) something called Windows in enhanced mode. also an unknown program called 5850 that i have no way into.
i tried to load win 3.1, but in the middle of the 2nd disk, it stopped, saying that a file called cga40woa.fon was either corrupted or in use by another program. can't find the file anywhere.
when i went to reboot the system, it hangs up saying my command interpreter is missing. only way to boot into system now is using my old 95 boot disk. somehow it does the trick.
i have tried to delete the windows directory that was left over from the partial install, but it won't do it. in dosshell, it tells me i have to delete the files in it first, but no files are showing as being in it. i have also tried to delete through dos itself, but it tells me that the files are not found. 
any good ideas here/
also - anybody know of a program that can 'read' a serial # off of a cd? need one so i can access a 95 disk.
thanks for the help.


----------



## Elvandil (Aug 1, 2003)

Try removing the partitions and reformatting.

Why not move up in the world to DOS 7.1?

http://www.ddvip.net/OS/dos/index2/soft/dos71_1.zip (floppy1)
http://www.ddvip.net/OS/dos/index2/soft/dos71_2.zip (floppy2)
or
http://www.ddvip.net/OS/dos/index2/soft/dos71scd.zip (CD install)

and Windows for Workgroups 3.11:

http://www.peteweb.com/oldos/wfw311.zip


----------



## starrekin61 (Dec 2, 2004)

hi. Elvandil. Don't know if i can reformat yet. how much memory does dos 7.1 need to run? thanks.


----------



## ChuckE (Aug 30, 2004)

starrekin61 said:


> how much memory does dos 7.1 need to run? thanks.


MS DOS 7.1 was what came bundled with Windows 98.
MS DOS 7.0 came with Windows 95
MS DOS 6.22 was the last MS version that you could buy as a stand-alone MS DOS.
(There was a version 6.3 and 7.0 IBM PC-DOS also, but I was talking about MS-DOS.)
See: http://www.sylpher.com/dosuser/doshist.htm
See: http://home.earthlink.net/~rlively/MANUALS/VERSIONS/INDEX.HTM

DOS, any version, is not so much dependent on memory. It is not like an OS that requires many different running processes to run the core. With DOS basically all you need is the COMMAND.COM (along with a loaded SYS file).
I'll bet you could run MS DOS 6.22 on as little as 256KBytes of memory.

Remember the old "full up" 640KB PC's, with the 256K of extended memory? "wow!"  They ran Windows 3.1 just fine.


----------



## Elvandil (Aug 1, 2003)

starrekin61 said:


> hi. Elvandil. Don't know if i can reformat yet. how much memory does dos 7.1 need to run? thanks.


No idea what memory requirements you have. How much memory in on that system?

Grab another hard drive and use the DOS 7.1 installation disks above to try it out. Or save what you have on that drive and try it out.


----------



## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

I've got Wfwg 3.11 running under DOS 7.1 with long filename support. It only NEEDS 1mb, but runs better with 4-8Mb.
I also have a simple DOS 6.22 based version, without any specific drivers, that loads and runs in a RAMDISK off CD.


----------

