Quicken 6.0 for DOS Won't Install

BigCJ

I downloaded Quicken 6 from the library, and it refuses to complete installation. When it asks for the second diskette, it errors out saying that the diskette may be damaged and to retry installing. When the program terminates, it says "Disk error: read fault on drive D". I can move the installation files to the hard disk, but it still gives the same error. is my optical drive. I tried it both on VMs and real hardware, but it still fails. Any idea why this happens?

ibmpc5150

At least, there is no problem to install Quicken 6 DOS from floppy drive (A: or B:)

Also dumped disk images of 3.5" format are verified.
(I also have 5.25" disk version of it and compared all files with 3.5" ones.)

Therefore there is issue with your H/W. (Not S/W problem.)

SomeGuy

Strange. It works fine for me, and it seems to be a well-behaved installer. That is, it seems to install fine for me if all of the files are copied to a folder on a hard drive.

We are talking about the Quicken 6 for DOS, with two 720k disk images?

It sounds like your copy got corrupted. I'd try re-downloading them and re-extracting them from the images. Perhaps use a different tool to write/extract the files.

ibmpc5150

@SomeGuy

https://winworldpc.com/product/quicken/60-dos

Yes, the media is 3.5" 720KB.
All files are just identical to 5.25" ones.

BigCJ

It's Quicken 6.0 for DOS with two 720k images. Redownloaded and extracted the diskette images from the .7z with WinRAR. Still didn't work. Tried again with jZip. The installer still fails. VPC2K7 is my virtualizer with MS-DOS 6.00 installed, and the standalone is a Packard Bell with PC DOS 5.00 Rev1. The images were written to physical diskettes for the standalone using WinImage 9.00.

ibmpc5150

@BigCJ

At least it is related with H/W compatibility issue.
I don't use Winimage on Windows if possible.

As you know, FDC handle on Windows are Not so stable than on real DOS.
Also I recommend to refer about Int-13

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INT_13H


So I don't write disk image to physical diskette on Windows.
(I always write disk image to diskette on real DOS PC on MS-DOS 6.xx)

BigCJ

@ibmpc5150
That doesn't help at all. The virtualizer running DOS doesn't work with the images, and fails in the exact same way as a physical machine. This tells me that WinImage is writing the diskette fine, so that isn't an issue. WinImage is the premier utility for writing diskettes and has never failed before unless the physical diskette was damaged.

SomeGuy

I seem to recall VPC does not support 720k disks. Winimage has a built in resize tool. You can resize an image to 1.44mb. You might try 1.44mb disks on the real computer too and see if that makes a difference.

You might also try a "clean boot", just in case you have installed some TSR or driver that is confusing it.

BigCJ

VPC supports 720k and 1.44Mb diskette images. I actually tried resizing the image and wrote them to high-density diskettes, that didn't work either.

I'll pick apart my startup files to see if something is screwy there.

BigCJ

Fixed! Apparently, the Quicken installer hates Microsoft's Compact Disc Extensions, MSCDEX.EXE. It doesn't matter if I use v2.21 from 1990, the ones that were included with DOS 6.xx, or even the version included with Windows 9x, they all prevent the installer from working right. I guess that junk about "Disk error on drive " should have been a clue. Funny thing is, the program itself works fine regardless of whether MSCDEX is running once it is installed.

SamirD

It probably wasn't MSCDEX as we would run this when we used quicken on our old dos/win 3.1 system back in the day. The problem is free memory below 640k as quicken needed as much of it as it could, and the installer probably does too.

Rule of thumb, strip down your environment to only what you need when running potentially memory sensitive programs.

And fwiw, Quicken runs beautifully in a windows xp command prompt. You can even still buy checks for it.