[jcortes]

Ok Here it goes. I work for a school and they have an ancient peace of software for court reporting that runs in a DOS environment on really old computers.

In some of the other labs we replaced some older computers with upgraded core 2 duo machines and now we have left over pentium 3 and pentium 4 computers that we want to convert to DOS so they can run the court reporting software on it.

I successfully imaged one of the old DOS machines and installed it on a FAT16 partition on one of the older pentium 3 computers. Now the problem im having is getting the court reporting machine, which connects through a serial port, to connect to work with the software the link is engaged for like 5 seconds and then disconnects. It also works find in other parts of the software but not the main one.

I know that it is a hardware related issue but why would one machine work and another with different hardware not?

[Mak213]

Hello,

This could all be down to the hardware used. A PIII machine was not designed to run DOS. It could be well that DOS does not and can not mount the ports on the machie or setup the IRQ's to run the hardware.

Cheers,
Mak

[forrestcupp]

You might be better off running Windows on the machines and running the program through DOSBox. It's a DOS emulator that pretty much has 100% emulated compatibility. It emulates older hardware on your newer hardware, so that might take care of your problem.

If you can't afford to put Windows on them, put some kind of free Linux, like Ubuntu. DOSBox has a Linux version, too.

The main reason people use DOSBox is for old DOS games, but it will run anything DOS.

And your original problem is probably because you "imaged" your DOS set up from one computer to another one that had totally different hardware. You can't do that. Just use DOSBox.