Running Tally 4.5 in Windows XP using Virtual PC 2007 (Updated)
I remember this CA (Charted Accountant) friend of mine was hassled because he wasn't able to run the old (only DOS) version of Tally 4.5 on Windows XP. (Those of it who don't what is Tally; It is a very popular accounting software.)
And he had asked me look into finding solutions for it. So I start looking for ways to do it. And found that using a virtualization to be the easiest way to go about. I had tried other virtual PC emulators like Qemu and VMware Player but I found that Microsoft's Virtual PC to be the most easily (for the normal computer user) method to do this.
Now that Virtual PC 2007 is free, we can do this without buying one.
To get started:
Download, Install:
- Download the free Virtual PC from the Microsoft's site.
- Download the Win98 Bootdisk ISO image from AllBootDisks.
- Install the Virtual PC 2004 on to your system.
- After installation, start the program and start by creating a new Virtual Machine by using the Virtual Machine Wizard, name this "MS DOS Machine" or "Tally Machine". Select OS as "MS DOS".
- During the process, the Wizard will ask whether you want an existing virtual hard disk, or a new virtual hard disk. Select "new virtual hard disk". Enter a name for the file, something like "Tally.vfd".
- Save the settings.
Format, Prepare and Get ready:
- Start this newly created virtual machine by selecting it and clicking Start button. After few seconds of bios output, the screen will say unable to find a bootable device. This is normal, since we haven't made our virtual hard disk bootable.
- Now click on CD menu and select the "Capture ISO image ..." option. This will popup a file selection dialong box. Select the ISO image that we have downloaded from AllBootDisks.
- Now restart the virtual machine by selecting the Action menu and select the "Ctrl+Alt+Del". After restart the VM (virtual machine) will boot using the Windows 98 boot disk ISO we just loaded and come to
A:>
prompt. - Now run the FDISK program and create the "Primary DOS partition" on the drive. After exiting FDISK, restart the VM and again boot from the CD again.
- Now when at the
A:>
prompt, issue a format command with parameters something like this:format c:/u/s/v:TALLY
- After the format is complete, switch to C: drive, create a directory by the name of DOS, by issuing the command
MD C:\DOS
- Now copy all the files from the
A:
drive or the bootable CD drive to theC:\DOS
directory. - Select the "Release CD" from the CD menu and restart the VM.
- Now the machine would have booted from the C drive and come to a
C:>
prompt. - Now select the "Capture Floppy Disk Image" option from the Floppy menu. This would open up a file selection dialog box. Goto the directory where you had installed the Virtual PC.
Should be something like this
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual PC
; Now in this directory there should be directory by the nameVirtual Machine Additions
; Select this and then select the file with the name ofDOS Virtual Machine Additions.vfd
; You have just loaded a virtual floppy. - Switch to
A:>
drive. And run the commandDOSADD.BAT
. This will add the required additional features like folder share, etc to this Dos VM. - Select the "Release Floppy" from the Floppy menu and restart the VM.
Installing and Running Tally:
- After the restart, the DOS will load additional programs. After the booting is done; right-click the "Folder Icon" on the bottom status bar and select "Share Folder" option. Select the folder in which your tally installation or installed folder is and select the drive letter as Z.
- Copy the data from the Z drive to the C drive by creating appropriate folder; After its done, switch to the
C:\TALLY
folder and start tally and viola, you are done.
Updates:
If you have copied the data / folder from your old set, you can specify the direct path in the
command line, for e.g. if your data is stored in C:\TALLY\DATA
, you can specify the
command C:\>TALLY C:\TALLY\DATA
to run tally and look in C:\TALLY\DATA
for the data
instead of specified in the tally configuration file.
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