I doubt it. This "move" thing sounds suspicious. But why not just try it?

It doesn't seem to work. I moved the key from the old Win 3.11 machine to the original floppy. I opened DOSBox on the Win XP machine, mounted both C: and A:, then tried to move the key from A: to C:. It reported back to me that there was no key present on A: so there was nothing to move.

I returned the key back to the old Win 3.11 machine's C: drive, so at least the process didn't hurt anything.

How did you mount the A-drive in DOSBox?

In DOSBox, I used the following command:
mount A A:\

After mounting drive A, I used the DOS "copy" command to move a file from A: to C: to make sure that it was working correctly, and it was.

You could try mounting the diskette with:

mount A "A:\" -t floppy

Both when you export, and when you import the key.

Your question made me think a little more about the mount procedure.

I tried mounting drive A again, but this time I had no disk in the drive when I tried it, and I got an error message.

I exited and restarted DOSBox, then placed a disk in the A drive before mounting, then the mounting worked OK.

What if I switched floppies after mounting drive A? Is A tied to the drive or a particular floppy in the drive? My test file that I copied from A to C was on one floppy, but the program key that I tried to move was on a different floppy.

What if I switched floppies after mounting drive A?

ctrl-f4, see the readme

Still doesn't work. I tried using mount A "A:\" -t floppy with the program floppy in drive A. This allows me to see and copy any of the files on A, but when I try the program's "move a c" command to move the key, it immediately tells me that the key is not present on A.

Guess I will need to keep that old Windows 3.11 machine around to use this program. The software author is still around and has newer versions, but he is extremely difficult to contact and work with.

MiniMax wrote:

I doubt it. This "move" thing sounds suspicious. But why not just try it?

My guess is that the special "move" program want to read/write the key-file from a special location on the disk. Or maybe it does something special to the file-system on the diskette. And the DOSBox diskette-emulation don't allow for this kind of special-access.

You could try this:

1) Moving the key to the real diskette.
2) Make an image of the diskette. I am not sure which program to use for this.
3) Copy the diskette-image to the new PC with DOSBox.
4) Mount the diskette-image in DOSBox with

imgmount A "C:\path\to\the\diskette.img" -t floppy
mount C: "C:"

5) Run the "move" program and see if it recognize the key inside the image.

With Win2K/XP it's possible the key transfer thing doesn't work because it expects to worth with a FAT file system, not NTFS. You could add a drive with a FAT partition in 2K/XP, but there's a bunch of caveats with that and it still might not work.

If the program is using sector-based disk manipulations with INT 13H, it might be necessary to use a hard disk image with DOSBox in addition to the floppy image.

Some of the more extreme forms of copy protection involving floppy disks used sectors with unusual formats, intentionally bad CRCs, or even physical damage to the disk that programs try to verify... if it's got something like that, it might not be possible to get it to work in DOSBox with the copy protection still intact.

That is some copy protection. I would install windows 3.1 or 3.11 on dosbox and then try to run the program with windows 3.1 or 3.11.
It will most likely get the program to work.

One of the first things that I tried was to make an image of the floppy using Winimage. I thought that might help if the floppy ever got lost or damaged. However, when I ran Winimage on the floppy, it kept reporting bad sectors ..60, 61, 62, 63, 64 etc. I was selecting ignore, but there seemed too many, so I aborted. I suspect Ripsaw8080 is correct. This sounds like something that the author would do.

abyss: helpful like a cut-off head. Go watch the Teletubbies and learn something.

Antennaguy wrote:

One of the first things that I tried was to make an image of the floppy using Winimage. I thought that might help if the floppy ever got lost or damaged. However, when I ran Winimage on the floppy, it kept reporting bad sectors ..60, 61, 62, 63, 64 etc. I was selecting ignore, but there seemed too many, so I aborted. I suspect Ripsaw8080 is correct. This sounds like something that the author would do.

Doesn't Winimage report bad sectors if they are *physically* bad? That's not something you could do from software. What's the size of the 'move key' program? If it's small, it might be easy to debug.

JAL