Dos 5 upgrade dilemna \ VOGONS

Dos 5 upgrade dilemna

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First post, by wiccadwitch

wiccadwitch Offline

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I decided it might be nice to upgrade my old compuadd 212 from its dos 4.1 to dos 6 mainly for the utilities and general user improvements. So starting with upgrading to dos 5.0 was the suggestion via googling the process. At least if i want to avoid a complete system format and install of the dos 6 from scratch. The computer has a 40mb hdd with around 18mb available which should be more than enough but im getting an error saying there isnt enough space available on my hdd. Ive seen a couple of possible causes. One of which simply being a corrupt version of the software that isnt reading properly. Unfortunately i cant find a secondary source from the internet archive to download the 3.5 floppy files of dos 5 upgrade software to test this. Is this something soneone on the forum might be able to provide? Any other suggestions welcome of course for solutions. Pic of the error screen for context. Thanks!

Reply 1 of 6, by Disruptor

Posted on Yesterday, 16:15

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You surely mean DOS 4.01
Can you post a picture please of a

1chkdsk c:

Reply 2 of 6, by wiccadwitch

Posted on Yesterday, 16:53

wiccadwitch Offline

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Oh 🤣 yes i believe i do mean dos 4.01 sorry about that
chkdsk c: here it is!

Reply 3 of 6, by Thandor

Posted on Yesterday, 17:37

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CHKDSK reports errors, this might be an issue when upgrading MS-DOS. You can use the /F parameter to correct the filesystem.

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Reply 4 of 6, by VileR

Posted on Yesterday, 17:40

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There you go... you have 1.8 MB free, not 18.

There's not much to "installing" MS-DOS, so you could always try that /minimum option and copy the rest from a floppy install after getting rid of the DOS 4 stuff (or EXPAND from the installation media).

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Reply 5 of 6, by Jo22

Posted on Yesterday, 21:09

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A solution that comes to mind is using MS-DOS 6.20/6.22.
It has drive compression. I've succesfully used it on an PC/XT with a 20 MB HDD.
Just make sure to backup data. While compression is working fine most of time, a sector error or similar hardware defect can cause trouble.

Solution b) would be to use DoubleDisk or other drive compressions.
They're not as integrated into the OS as Double Space/Drive Space, though.
Data Becker had Double Density, for example.

There are more utilities. IBM-DOS used SuperStor, for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_compression

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Reply 6 of 6, by wiccadwitch

Posted on Yesterday, 21:53

wiccadwitch Offline

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Thanks for all the suggestions! Im admittedly curious where all the drive space is currently allocated. Like which files are using up the most space and are any of them expendable.

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