The Cinderella Review of IBM PC DOS 2000 It is something of a change for me to be complimentary about the products of my old alma mater, but this time IBM has produced a useful Y2k tool. IBM PC DOS 2000 is PC DOS 7 upgraded for Year 2000 and Eurocurrency and comes with Stac Electronics Stacker 4 and Central Point Backup built in. So finally we have a upgrade path for older DOS systems and the DOS base driver for Microsoft Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and OS/2. Works with Win 95. For me, the most important feature is Stacker 4. The increased compression gave me an additonal 100MB of usable space on a 300MB compressed drive, achieving 2,1:1 as opposed to 1,7:1 which was the best I had previously attained. I have always used CP Backup, because it was the only backup package which I could use (using the internal disk format) that would migrate data successfully between any system from DOS 3.2 up without the problems of conflicting disk formats and which truly supported 360k floppies in 1.2M drives. This new release removes some weaknesses in older versions and fixes the Scheduler. I must say I have always preferred the E editor over EDIT, so builtin REXX and enhancements to the E editor and the IBM Antivirus tool are nice to have. But the kickers for me are Euro, Stacker and CP Backup. From the viewpoint of the purist Y2ker, ho hum. There is a built in BIOS fix to eliminate rollover, nothing specially new that we cannot do already with Rightime, but SLUG2000 works fine with PC DOS 2000, and also the COUNTRY=002 kludge for YMD display, so my Y2k needs are met. I had hoped that DIR would finally display 4 digit years, which it does not. So for me, this was a disappointment, but I can live with it. Maybe someone should put this down on the list of things to do. The Cinderella Method still applies. Apart from the Eurocurrency support, there is nothing Y2k special in PC DOS 2000 that cannot be achieved using setups, patches and workarounds on older releases. However, it cleans up a lot of little annoyances and gives good new functionality. At last, the Nervous Nellies have an industrial strength Y2k and Euro migration path. The 597 page manual is good. The online documentation features are good. All in all, a very useful product, it gets a Cinderella 4 pumpkins out of 5 . Highly recommended for commercial users of DOS who need Euro and robustness. Now all we have to do is convince the Suits in the Ivory Tower that they need to get this product out on the retail shelves and start marketing it. Novel thought. Chris Anderson 1998-07-31 ------------------------------------------------- THE TESTS There were two environments that I specifically wanted to test out. The first was an MS-DOS 6,2 system running Windows 3.1 on a 300 MB DRVSPACE scsi disk, with very complex and crucial CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT Menuing. I will call this system A. The second was a MS-DOS 6.2 system running dualboot OS/2 and Windows 95. All on the same 300MB IDE drive, in raw FAT format. I will call this system B. First off, I copied the six 1.4MB diskette images off the CD containing the update. I could have run directly from CD, but I chose the stiffie option because I eventually want to upgrade my laptop, which has no CD drive. SYSTEM A Off to a false start. Boot from A: and run setup. I then discovered that the uncompressed portion of my drive was too small to contain PC DOS 7. The Base install needs around 6MB, and installing the features pushes this up. As with all IBM products, the documented space requirements (hidden away of course) are wildly optimistic. I came up with this approximation, and it worked for me. TABLE 1. Disk space needed. 225k Pendos 540k PCDOS Shell 770k PCMCIA 1100k Antivirus 100k Rexx 5500k Stacker 1300k CP Backup 6000k Base ---- 15045k So I first had to use DRVSPACE to reduce my compressed disk and release free space to the uncompressed portion. I freed up 15MB after a little messing about. There is a subtle implication here as well, Windows is installed on the DRVSPACE drive and therefore cannot be seen during the initial setup stage, i.e. before Stacker is running. So this configuration is going to need a double install. Just to make the test a little more interesting in a Y2k sense, I changed the date to 2000-01-01. Time 12:35 Start Boot from A:, run Setup. Screen displays: DATE/TIME: 01-01-00 12:35 COUNTRY: United States KEYBOARD: US Default FONT: Non-ISO font You have the opportunity to change these defaults. I left them as they were. Note: Setup is not particularly Y2k compliant, but what the heck. The system then displays the features to select. Essentially the information in TABLE 1. Hint: use the uparrow to see the whole list before you do any selecting. Time: 12:50 6 diskettes loaded, Press enter to start. Start Virus check on the disk drives that it can see. At this stage I did a looking around to see what was new. "help" is a useful command. try: view cmdref view dosrexx view doserror mem displayed largest executable size of 598k At this point I lost some time, as Stacker did not automatically connect to my DRVSPACE disk, and I had to learn some new stuff quite fast. Eventually I decided to connect manually as follows. 1. dir /ah - to display hidden files. this showed me that DRVSPACE.000 was the compressed drive name. 2. dconvert /c c:\drvspace.000 - to convert to STACKVOL.DSK, took 13 seconds 3. e /i - to edit the hiden stacker control file and manually add the following line (all in UPPERCASE please note) E:/STACKVOL.DSK,SW And rebooting. TIME : 15:00 This allowed my compressed volume to be seen. Using the 'stac' command I then "Converted" the DRVSPACE drive to stacker, and used the "Optimiser" with the Max-Space option to reorg and recompress. This resulted in an increase of the usable compressed space of 103.6M, and the ratio chagned from 1,7:1 to 2,1:1. TIME: 17:00 At this point my system could "see" the compressed drive as "C:" and my C:\WINDOWS and C:\DOS directories were now readable. I also moved the \STACKER directory from the uncompressed E: drive to the compressed C: drive. So I did a complete reinstall of PC DOS 2000 by booting from A: to ensure that the patches to Windows initialisation files were correctly done. TIME: 17:30 6th disk loaded, system reboots and starts virus check on all drives TIME: 17:45 Made Minor editing changes to the modified AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS TIME: 18:00 Reboot, run Windows. Cleanup and testing of various functions. TIME: 19:15 End. Start backup to tape. So. About 7 hours of upgrade, cradle to grave. With a fairly steep learning curve because of the non-standard instal. But a very satisfactory end result. This system has now been in use for a week and has been rock solid stable. SYSTEM B. The upgrade to the DOS 6.2, OS/2, Win/95 system went smoothly. I shutdown Win 95 to restart in Dos Mode, booted PC DOS 2000 form A: and off it went. However I made one mistake. I forgot that the boot image was Win 95, and I did not have a Windows Startup disk available, nor a backup of the boot image. I usually use FIPS (from the free Linux Distributions) to take such a backup. So PC DOS 2000 overwrote the Win 95 boot image. All I needed to do at this stage was restore the Win 95 boot image. But I didn't have one. I tried to fix Win 95 by restarting from CD. But sadly, the upgrades and changes I had made to my registry produced conflicts and the Setup croaked. I had no option but to do a complete reinstall of Win 95. But none of this is a PC DOS 2000 problem. Merely yet another argument for never proceeding without having adequate backup. And the new combined system works fine. The only trick is the instal sequence. Dos, then dualboot OS/2, then Win 95. In the fullness of time I will upgrade my laptop and see what happens with PCMCIA support, and fiddle around with the newer features such as RAMBOOST. But for now, I am happy that it all works, and that I can continue with Y2k application testing.and ata fixing.