Immobile Filemaker 5 file

[Al Bombay]

Hi folks,

I'm trying to help a friend move a Filemaker 5 file from an old computer running Windows 98 SE to a new computer running Windows XP. The problem is, any attempt to move or copy the Filemaker file on the old machine results in an instant Blue Screen O'Death. Scandisk on the old computer doesn't find any problems, and Filemaker 5 is able to read and write to the file without apparent problem. Filemaker 5 cannot, however, save a copy of the file, as attempts to do so cause Filemaker 5 to crash. Has anyone seen anything like this before? Does anyone have any suggestions as to how we might copy this file? My friend has not yet tried copying the file from Windows safe mode or from DOS, so we'll try that tomorrow?

Anyway, thanks for any help or suggestions you might provide.

Al

[QuinTech]

Hi Al. Good thing you're moving this file to a new machine, this is indeed a very unusual problem. Try copying it from a console window and see what happens. I have noticed (very unscientifically, i might add) that FM seems to have more memory conflicts with hardware than most other applications. I've seen FM locking memory that optical drives want to access, among other devices; i think maybe printers, too. If you have any "non-standard" hardware on the machine, you might try removing those first, though if the FM file is not open there definitely shouldn't be a conflict.

If/when you do get the fp5 to the new computer, it may make sense to completely re-build the structure in FM 7, depending on the complexity of the file. It's a completely different relational model (as you may be aware), and there's likely to be some corruption in this fp5 based on the BSODs you're seeing.

HTH.

Jerry