Old DOS program

[brianjay]

I work with 100 Win XP computers and I need to put an old DOS program on 3 of them. The problem is that the disks are compressed with the old ".su_" extension. Is there a way to expand and run the programs on an XP machine?

 

[jrbarnett]

Hello

There should be a DOS program on the first disk which will probably be called INSTALL.EXE or SETUP.EXE which will be able to decompress the contents of these files.
If you run it from a command prompt window, it should be fine.

John

 

[brianjay]

OOPS, close but no cigar. I cheked and all of the files on the disk and their extensions end with a "_" or a "$". The only files that have any possible vales are setup.inf and setup.lst. There are no hidden files on the disk either. The 2 other disks only carry data files.

 

[TonHu]

Is a disk missing? the one that holds the original INSTALL.EXE :-( ?

I recall some backup program also using these extension-modification when writing to floppy's, but can't recall which one it was...

HTH
TonHu

 

[brianjay]

Nope; 3 disks to the set. I also remember back in the DOS 3.3 days when there was a file called "Expand.exe" but if I can't find it on my DOS 6.2 disks. I guess that file is compressed too. I need to know if there is a WinXP process for doing the same thing.

 

[linney]

Have you tried the Expand File option in MSconfig? If you can use that it may save your file in a given location as uncompressed.

Type "Expand" in the Help and Support" program.

 

[jrbarnett]

Expand.exe isn't compressed; it can't be because it needs to be able to decompress the files, and the one thing it can't do is decompress itself.

Try copying it to the hard drive and running

EXPAND A:\filename.su_ c:\progdir\filename.sul

or whatever the full extension name is.

An alternative suggestion of course is if you already have a machine with a working setup is to copy the entire program directory to the other machine via LAN or removable storage (CD-Rw, USB pen drive etc) as DOS programs very rarely have dependencies to files outside of their directories.

John