Help needed installing a 25 year old CD ROM into Windows 10

[Zaphod99]

We bought a charity shop CD-ROM today, called UK INFO DISK 2000 SE, containing the 1999 UK Electoral Roll, 47 million records.  I have tried running SETUP, both in normal mode and as Administrator, but very little happens.  (Basically it doesn't do much).

I know it's 25 years old, but can anyone suggest how to try installing it in some kind of compatibility mode.  I am very IT-competent, so I'm prepared to try advanced options.

Zaph

[Andy J2022]

CD-ROMs often just contain data files, and won't have an autorun facility. Have you tried using File Explorer to look at the main directory of the CD?  Make sure you have file extensions enabled, and see if you able to identify the main data files. The data could be in pdf or one of many other formats, including csv, dbf or xls. You may be able to open one of them with something like Office or Word. However if Windows doesn't even recognise that there is a CD inserted in the drive, there may be an alignment issue and the CD drive can't read the boot track on the CD.

[ShaunJ]

I that doesn't work you could try setting up a Windows XP Virtual Machine environment on your PC

https://www.download3k.com/articles/How-to-add-an-XP-Mode-Virtual-Machine-to-Windows-10-or-8-using-Hyper-V-00770

[Rattus]

You used the phrase "some kind of compatibility mode" so you might already have tried this, but if you right-click the setup file in Windows Explorer and click Properties, is there a 'Compatibility' tab?

If so, you can run the troubleshooter there. Alternatively, try running the program in compatibility mode for an older version of Windows. I'd try Windows XP first, then Windows 95 if XP didn't work. 

[familydar]

I have a slightly younger version of this - 2004 SE - and I've managed to install it on a Win 10 machine just now without needing to tweak anything.

The top level start.htm and autorun won't work, because they are looking for an obsolete browser, but if you use file explorer to navigate to the appropriate directory on the disk and double-click setup.exe, the program installs and seems to run perfectly happily.

It sounds as if your disk might be corrupt.

Jane :-)

[David Nicoll]

Hi, I would say that you may be out of luck unless you set up a virtual machine. A 2000 cd is almost certainly a 16 bit app and Windows 7 was the last OS to support this reliably.
If your Win10 is a 32 bit install you may get it to work, but video drivers can make things very tricky.
If it is a 64 bit install and you have been updating, Microsoft seem to have removed the functionality relatively recently.
Those 4 years are critical. And it is probably a 32 bit app and hence still supported.

[Calverley Lad]

Zaph: Could you try and copy your CD onto another blank CD.
I have had a limited success reading the information from the new copy CD.
 Brian

[Zaphod99]

Thank you for all the helpful suggestions, here is an update. Last night I realized that although I thought nothing was happening, each time I clicked on the setup program it was starting a program. I now see that I have three iterations of it waiting for me to click continue. I have killed two of those and allowed the program to run. I got the following error messages, do you think this last one is a fatal error?

"The program or feature '\??‘\F:\NTSETUP'\SETUP.EXE" cannot start or run due to incompatibity with 64-bit versions of Windows. Please contact the software vendor to ask if a 64-bit Windows compatible version is available."

Ultimately the s/w installs OK, but doesn't quite work as it should, making it useless.

The program seems to have installed okay but when I start to use it the button that controls the operation, to start a search for a particular name the button is grayed out.

Finally, a friend has suggested: install Virtualbox and then install XP on top of that.  Has anyone ever tried that?

Thanks
The Zaphs

[familydar]

Do you need to select a region/county first?  Something vaguely at the back of my mind about this.

Jane :-)