# Solved: Restoring\mounting a doublespace backup in win xp



## Martyman420 (Aug 21, 2005)

My mom's old computer, an XT running DOS 6.00 or earlier (I mean 1980's ancient), died. The BIOS went out. I took out the hard drive a few years ago and slaved it to a machine running Windows 98 and then did a "copy D: to C:" command through the command prompt. I ended up with five files:

DBLSPACE.000
DBLSPACE.BIN
DBLSPACE.INI
IO.SYS
MSDOS.SYS

Last week I burned them to cd so I could take the files home to seattle to figure out how to open them. Now, I know that the DBLSPACE.000 is the compressed drive image that holds all of the information that was created with the microsoft doublespace backup\compresion utility in dos 6.00 or earlier that was later replaced by the DRVSPACE.EXE in DOS 6.22. I need a way to mount the image or restore the files in Microshaft Windblows XP Pro so I can get to all of the WordPerfect 5.1 files. She has writings that need to be edited and published. Any tips on converting the WordPerfect 5.1 files (.W51 extentions I think) to Word or Text files would be helpful too! Show me your monkey voodoo and do what no other has done before by satisfying my mother. 

Revision:
After further research I have found that if I was running windows 98 I could use the windows 98 startup disk, choose option 2, and uncompress the image using a "scandisk \mount" command. Does Windows XP have such a feature?


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## ~Candy~ (Jan 27, 2001)

Hi and welcome. 
IO.SYS
MSDOS.SYS

Those are pretty much some files that are on a boot disk.

http://forums.techguy.org/archive/index.php/t-30072.html

I did find that.


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## JohnWill (Oct 19, 2002)

Have you considered booting from a MS-DOS boot floppy and having those files on a hard disk and trying to access them? Did you take a look at this MS-KB article? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/154839/EN-US/


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## Martyman420 (Aug 21, 2005)

JohnWill said:


> Have you considered booting from a MS-DOS boot floppy and having those files on a hard disk and trying to access them? Did you take a look at this MS-KB article? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/154839/EN-US/


Yes, I tried that and I've seen all of the articles pertaining to doublespace. I've been trying to avoid elaborate Multiple OS installs.And DOS won't recognize my hard drive because I think it needs to be a FAT partition instead of NTFS. And both of my hard drives are full. I was hoping I could do this without having to buy a new hard drive. Come to think of it I am pretty sure that if I copy the files to a hard drive and have nothing else on it besides those files DOS should boot up normally without a boot disk and I can transfer the files to another partition. But there's got to be another way. If Windows 98 can uncompress the drive with a simple SCANDISK \MOUNT command Windows XP should be able to also don't you think? I've been reluctant to try because I have tons of other image type files on my HD and I'm unsure what would happen.


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