What is DOS Mounter 95?

DOS Mounter 95 is a control panel for System 7 and up that eases the use of DOS/Windows disks with your Mac.  It lets you mount and also format drives, even Iomega Zip cartridges for PC usage.  One of the best features is it handles Windows 95 or NT4 long file names.  DOS Mounter 95 also gives you a lot of power in how file extensions on those drives are mapped to your Mac applications.

DOS Mounter 95 includes a utility that lets you format SCSI-based removables and hard disks with Windows or Mac partitions. You can even partition a disk with one section formatted for Windows and one for the Mac OS.

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Even though Windows 95 isn't selling as well as expected — and few applications take advantage of its capabilities yet — chances are somebody in your company is already creating Win 95 Files that you’ll need to access on your Macintosh. When that need arises, you’ll want a copy of Software Architects’ DOS Mounter 95, an upgrade to the well-known DOS Mounter 5.0 file-transfer utility.

DOS Mounter 95 lets you mount Windows 95 or Windows 3.1 disks (floppies and removable media, but not hard drives) on your Macintosh, It’s the flip side of DataViz's MacOpener, which is designed for accessing Macintosh files on PCs... Although they serve a similar purpose, DOS Mounter 95 has a transparency that MacOpener cant match.

I tested DOS Mounter 95 on a Micron P90 running Windows 95 and on a Power Macintosh 7100/80, transferring Microsoft Word and Excel files. Although DOS Mounter 95's control panel has an interface forgetting file information... and mapping DOS extensions to your Mac applications, you don’t need the interface to transfer files.

Like Software Architects’ PC product Here & Now..., DOS Mounter 95 is easy to use. Slip in a PC-format disk and its icon pops up on your Mac’s desktop. The program handles Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 files with equal ease.

DOS Mounter 95 isn’t perfect, though. The installation process required me to first delete DOS Mounter 5.0 (or any other DOS mounting utilities), then install DOS Mounter 95 in the Control Panels folder and install the MultiMounter utility in the Extensions folder. Unlike many similar applications, DOS Mounter 95 has no installer utility to delete previous versions and put the various new pieces where they belong.

If you’re going to he exchanging files a lot, you’ll have to leap some file-naming hurdles. Windows 95's long file names appeared without a hitch; in fact, because Windows 95 allows 255 characters and the Mac allows only 31, it’s now the Windows file names that get truncated when moved to a Mac. A Windows file named Macworld Catalog of Feature Stories, 1995 became Macworld Catalog of Fe-BCG.doc.

The -BCG is a random designation that DOS Mounter 95 generates. According to Software Architects, DOS Mounter 95 adds the 3-character DOS extension so that a PC can still read the files. When I took the disk back to the PC, Win 95 recognized the files as Word but truncated the file names to 8 characters; Win 95 automatically hid the extension.

It’s important to remember that because DOS Mounter 95 is a file-transfer utility — not a conversion utility — you need to have both the Mac and the PC version of each application. Unfortunately, version equivalency is becoming a problem for Macintosh users; Word 7.0 is available for Windows 95, while many Macintosh users are still using Word for Mac 5.1 or 6. That means you’ll have to save your PC files to the older application version’s format in order to read the files on a Mac.

The Last Word

Most of the things that make DOS Mounter 95 a problem can be traced to quirks in Windows 95 and the Mac OS rather than any inherent shortcomings. You’ll love the ease of transferring files between platforms — just watch out for those name truncations.

Baldwin, Howard. (March 1996). DOS Mounter 95. Macworld. (pg. 74).

 

Download DOS Mounter 95 for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

Mac OS 7.x - Mac OS 9.2.2

This is a control panel.  To install it, drag and drop it on the System Folder, accept when it asks to place it in control panels and then reboot.

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II