Hi people, I have just found this great site. I have an old Toshiba laptop that I am trying to install 3.1 back onto. The Toshiba companion disk which has the DOS on it has some bad sectors and I cannot boot it to install 3.1. I then tried booting to win98se DOS and that works. I have the original Toshiba 3.1 diskettes and have installed 3.1 but because I installed under win98 DOS it will not run. It declares an incorrect version of DOS. Can anyone please tell me what version of DOS I need to run 3.1? Where can I get a fresh copy of that DOS version since I own the corrupt original. I do not need the full DOS install, just a bootable DOS with Himem.sys on it. Thanks for any help. Dave

The DOS version for Windows 3.1 would be DOS 5.0, and perhaps DOS 6.x also. Windows 98se had DOS 7.x. It was years ago, but I once set up Windows 3.11 on DOS 7.x and I don't remember it being a problem. In fact, it seemed to run better than on the older DOS versions, but I did not do any subjective testing. But, if your Windows 3.1 refuses to run because of the "incorrect DOS version", then use the SETVER command. If you have Windows 98SE you'll find SETVER.exe in C:\WINDOWS. You can find how to use it by googling SETVER. There are different versions of DOS boot disks available at bootdisk.com, I don't know if they have HIMEM.SYS on them or not. You should also check out FreeDOS.org. There is some support for running Windows 3.1 on FreeDOS and free DOS utilities (like a HIMEM.SYS clone) which will run on most any DOS version.

Hi Pyro, This is 3.1 and not 3.11 so not sure if it is exactly the same. As far as I know 3.11 is 3.1 with Network support. I have an old CNC machine that has drivers for 3.1 so it has to be 3.1 and not 3.11. I was told by the CNC manufacturer it will not run under 3.11 but they have no manuals etc and I suspect they are guessing since it was built in 1992. I will check out the links you mentioned, thanks. I do also have M$oft 3.11 original disks here so may install them to see if it will boot with the w98 DOS. Then I can at least try the CNC driver and find out for myself if it will run the machine. IF I get lucky then the problem solved, if not then it is FreeDOS and anything beyond. <grin> Thanks again. Dave Dave

get syntax with setver /? ===================================== If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2

DaveDoesIT- I'm sorry if I gave too much information previously. Windows 3.1 WILL work with any MS-DOS version 5.0 OR LATER. All MS-DOS versions are 100% backward compatible with all properly written DOS software (I'm sure there maybe programs written for DOS 2.0 which won't work with newer DOS versions, but that's probably because they barely ran in DOS 2.0 anyway). If you correctly set up SETVER.EXE, it will communicate to Windows 3.1 during startup that the DOS from Windows 98se is "the correct" DOS and Windows 3.1 will run just fine. Microsoft provides SETVER.exe specifically for dealing with the "Incorrect DOS version" problem. I just mentioned that I don't remember having to use SETVER for running Windows 3.11, but that was unneccessary information.

Thanks Pyro, Dave Dave

Thanks M2, Dave