Hello,

I have been handed a hard drive that seems to contain some very old
Btrieve data. The original program was written in Qbasic (I think)
and was running on DOS 3.3. I don't know what version of Btrieve was
used, all I have are a few .dat files (no DDF files), which I believe
contain the data I want.

So, here I am on my Win2000 machine, trying to export this data into
something useful. When I try to run Butil it tells me that btrieve
isn't loaded. When I try to run btrieve.exe in a DOS box it gives me
an "incorrect Dos Version" error.

I know nothing about Btrieve and it has been a very long time since I
have owned a DOS machine, let alone a DOS 3.3 machine.

Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can get the data? Will I be
forced to setup a DOS 3.3 machine to run Btrieve and then somehow
export the data?

Thanks for your help,

please reply to: cda_alford (AT) yahoo (DOT) com

--cindy

Cindy:

You can get a free 30-day trial copy of the Pervasive.SQL V8 database
engine from www.pervasive.com/downloads. This engine contains Btrieve
V8, and will also read your old Btrieve files (back to V3). It even
comes with support for DOS applications on Win2000, so your old app will
likely still run as well!

As for exporting data, I recommend checking out the white paper on ODBC
access at www.goldstarsoftware.com/press.asp for some background
information. This lets you know what you are getting into here with the
export itself.

After that, if you have questions, we'll be happy to help guide you in
the right direction...
Goldstar Software Inc.
Building on Btrieve(R) for the Future(SM)
Bill Bach
BillBach (AT) goldstarsoftware (DOT) com
http://www.goldstarsoftware.com
*** Pervasive.SQL Service & Support Classes ***
Chicago: June, 2004: See our web site for details!


Cindy wrote: