Dos 5 Date and Time Loop

[cmd21]

I’m hoping someone here can point me in the right direction. I have an old computer system (1993 Vintage) that is running dos 5.0. I have an application that automatically runs when the computer boots. The software works fine when running on the old system although every once in a while this error does pop up. I use this application a lot and wanted to see if it would work running on newer computer. I created a mirror copy of the older drive and formatted a newer hard drive. (It’s an exact mirror i.e. fat file system, hard drive size etc…)

Everything looked like it was going to work out fine until I went to a new menu and the program crashed. I can reboot the system and use it for a short while before getting caught in the same loop. When the program crashes, I’m prompted to enter the time and date or press enter to continue. I have entered a time and day, as well as just pressing enter, the results are the same. I believe I found the file that generates the loop; however what I am unsure of is why.
Here is the line in the .bat file that either starts the program or this time & date loop.

Code: Select all

if errorlevel 200 goto ERROR
if errorlevel 100 goto START
goto END

I don’t know what the errorlevel 200 is referring to, or what conditions cause an error level 200. Anyone have any ideas on what I should look into next.

[foxidrive]

When testing an errorlevel - any particular errorlevel can be used for a different reason in every program.

In other words the programmer selects the errorlevels in his program.exe to be whatever he wishes. We have to know which program it is to be able to read the documentation and find out the reason.

So different programs can use errorlevel 200 and use it to mean different things.



Having said that - if the program is written in pascal then there are timing loop issues that make fast CPUs a problem.

You might be able to create a virtual machine in virtualbox and then run the program in that.