Colorado 8gb atapi on dos/w3.11

[Darren Jermy]

Hi there,
Managed to get a cheap bare drive for a customer who runs their epos/till systems on a windows 3.11 box.
They refuse to upgrade it when their jumbo 250 drive failed and i'm running out of options to keep the box there.
We got no software with it so i managed to get a copy of CBW version 3.1 and CBdos version 5.
None of which comes with a install assist. HP's site gives me a 32bit version of it.

Trying manaully telling CBW what the i/o locations are and it will not find the drive.
system is a 486 dx/66 Tulip branded system, possibly provided by the till installers.
I suspect that the drive wants an IDE channel all to itself for error correction, but there is only 1 ide channel.

anyone got any ideas?
Many thanks

[André Noordermeer]

Ah, nostalgia...
Those Tulips were built in Holland in the nineties and were notorious for their subtile incompatibilities.
The old Jumbo used the parallel port as a pseudo SCSI, but the atapi is newer and needs a IDE to itself.
I see 2 options only:
1. If the Win 3.11 is the "for Workgroups", then you can fit a NIC and copy data to a different PC. Be carefull to use an old NIC that's compatible with that platform.
2. Replace the box; sorry CDR, USB and all such modern options are out.
Besides that Tulip is probably going to die eventually anyway.

ad 2. If you find that the till/pos software won't run, you might try things like:
VirtualPC (MS or VMware), DOSBOX or TameDOS.
DOSBOX is a virtual PC created for keeping old DOS games alive.
Personnaly I would start with plain Windows95 or 98 as these still contain most of the 16bit Windows environment of 3.11

Good luck
André

[Darren Jermy]

Convinced customer to upgrade his server.
was delighted with teh results and got rest of system upgraded too.

problem solved.