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Solve : help with antiquated backup system? |
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Answer» Hi, I have a collection of old backups donated to our archive but we are unable to open them. They were created on 8th Feb 1988 on 3.5 inch floppies and they each contain a backup.001 file, a control.001 file and a restore file which is an MS dos application file. We have no idea what material is on the file but it may be important to preserve in our archive. Does anyone have any idea how we could open these files? Thanks for that, I have done a quick search to download an ms dos system and the results were mind boggling. ARe you able to recommend a program that will be able to do this for a 1988 backup and be able to run on a Windows vista pc? After a little searching, I may have been mistaken- searches seem to say that that those files (backup.001, control.001) were indeed created by a DOS backup, yet my books from the era (Running MS-DOS 2nd Edition by Van Wolverton) documents a different set of files (a [emailprotected] file and then the same files one backed up, without changes, which would have made your task easier). I am assuming that means that the backup was probably created by a DOS version later then 3.1. This leaves us with several possiblities- I am going to say that MS-DOS 5, being the last version to actually have the backup utility in question, may in fact be the version it was backed up with. Turns out I'm a lucky guesser- according to this, your files were indeed backed up by DOS 5. Here is a KB article from MS about these old BACKUP files. It seems to pertain to win95, though, so I'm not sure how relevant it will on the whole: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/138135/en-us Quote To restore a backup created with the Backup program included with MS-DOS 5.0, use the Restore.exe program located in the Other\Oldmsdos folder on the Windows 95 CD-ROM. To run this program, copy it to a folder on your hard disk, and then run it from a command prompt, making sure to use the appropriate syntax.It appears to suggest the use of tools from the windows 95 disk. If you have a windows 95 disc handy, this could be useful- otherwise it's not very helpful, I suppose. Another option is to create a Virtual Machine of the appropriate version of MS-DOS. One Virtual Machine program that should work for this purpose would be Microsoft's Virtual PC. You can get that here. SCROLL down a bit, Choose "Microsoft Virtual PC" from the left pane, and then "Microsoft Virtual PC 2007" from the left pane. Before one attempts this method, you would need the appropriate MS-DOS install disks for MS-DOS 5. you can get most DOS versions for extremely cheap off ebay. If you'd rather not pay (and who would, really) you can try FreeDOS, which is reported to also be compatible with the DOS 5 backup format. One would install the OS as if it was a new PC, mount the disk drive from your Host PC (I'm not sure on the semantics involved with Virtual PC, being that I usually Use VMWare). Once done, with any luck you'll be able to use DOS 5 or freeDOS's "restore" command and restore the files; at this point, the files will be on the virtual Machine. depending on the Virtual Machine you can sometimes share folders between them (which would require you to then use copy or MOVE commands in the virtual machine to move said files into the shared folder) Personally if I can't just "drag and drop" into my VMWare installations I will usually resort to using my trusty Image editor, WinImage. It's Shareware but you don't need any of the paid FEATURE for merely extracting or adding a few files to a disk, at least I don't believe you would. Unfortunately, it really seems like getting the data out of the backup disks is going to be quite akin to pulling teeth! If you're lucky you might be able to find and run an old copy of restore.exe from DOS 5 or 6 from within Vista (as long as you are using a 32-bit version) my attempts have all been met with "Incorrect DOS version" even after trying to use setver to change the reported version. |
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