DOS ...ooohhh the pain... Please help!!

[MacKitten]

Howdy, i have done a project on leg strength and muscular endurance but unfortunately the machine only runs on DOS. I have over 400 files that i have saved as ASCII and i wanna get them off without having to endure the tedious tast of inserting floppy discs and saving them {shudder} does anyone know if a can use a pen drive to save stuff, and what the command line would be if all the files contain the word ISO

please please help... Thanks

 

[Mr. Anderson]

I think the issue would be whether the drive is compatible with the DOS system and where you might transfer the files to.

Since they're ASCII, how big are they? And where do you want to transfer them to?

D

 

[bousozoku]

If your machine supports a pen drive, it will be given the single letter drive name like E: or F:, so the command line would look something like:

xcopy *ISO*.* F:

 

[MacKitten]

the files range from 400k - 2mb making it hard to just use a floppy. How do i know if the machine supports the pen drive? will i have to install any drivers?
thanks again!

Anna

 

[MacKitten]

would i have to format the pendrive as DOS in Disk Utility... and should i call it a particular name or doesnt it matter?

 

[x86]

Have you tried compressing the files with a ZIP utility of some sort? Text files can be highly compressed possibly allowing you to transfer the files to a few floppy disks. Also, just out of curiosity, why did you create this large project on a DOS computer!? What ever computer you have used to post your message has to be much better than that! lol.

 

[skubish]

would i have to format the pendrive as DOS in Disk Utility... and should i call it a particular name or doesnt it matter?

I think the easiest solution is to take the hard drive out of that computer, put it in an external enclosure and connect to a Windows computer. Do you know the interface on the hard drive? (SCSI, IDE, etc.). The file format on the hard drive is not DOS it is most likely FAT32 or FAT16. Windows can read those formats.

I don't think you will get the pendrive to work. I don't believe drivers for that were ever written for DOS.

 

[Makosuke]

I think the easiest solution is to take the hard drive out of that computer, put it in an external enclosure and connect to a Windows computer. Do you know the interface on the hard drive? (SCSI, IDE, etc.). The file format on the hard drive is not DOS it is most likely FAT32 or FAT16. Windows can read those formats.

I don't think you will get the pendrive to work. I don't believe drivers for that were ever written for DOS.

Really, unless it's not an MS-DOS (there are others, more modern and with more features), this is going to be your best bet. I seriously doubt there's any sort of USB support for MS-DOS, so a pendrive won't do you any good, and although you can get a DOS box hooked up to a network (I've done it), it's not pretty, and not easy.

If it's a one time thing, just yank the hard drive and connect it to another computer or an external enclosure. Heck, since it's almost certainly formatted as FAT16 or FAT32 even a Mac should be able to read it.

This was my solution when I needed to backup the data on an old DOS embedded controller in a milling machine--yank the drive, plug it into my G4's internal IDE, and copy the files. Relatively painless.

 

[Eniregnat]

would i have to format the pendrive as DOS in Disk Utility... and should i call it a particular name or doesnt it matter?

Depending on the version of DOS, reformating the pendrive shouldn't matter. It should already be FAT32. Also, don't name or rename the drive. I once found that this caused an error, but that was on an old Win95/DOS machine w.

You could also use an RS323 and a null modem to transfer data between two computers, like a DOS computer and a Windows machine.

Look for PKZIP or the Stacker utility (found on 7 only) if you want to compress the data. ASCII. It may already have PKZIP on the C drive. All Zip decompressors should be able to deal with the ZIP file.

This help file is bassicly the DOS manual/ Help feature. Also, it sounds stuped, but remember that a space followed by \ denotes modifiers. Syntax modifiers are stacked with out spaces. \v\p