I have an Estimating and Job Costing Program that I designed and had coded in DBase III PLus and compiled in Clipper in 1982. The program runs on DOS and has been working flawlessly all this time, until this past Tuesday. I have been having my bookkeeper re-index at least once every week because she would finish jobs and get 0's all over. Well this time it has been left hanging and idling after she started re-indexing. Here is the error message we get if we try to enter the program now:


You have encountered an OPEN error and there is a possibility that you will be able to continue with this program. A probable cause of this
error is a missing index file. After returning to the main menu, re-index
your data. If you still receive this error after re-indexing your data,
please report the following information to BCD SOFTWARE:

Program: SHAR1X, Line: 82, Error type: open error

Other information (if any): SET INDEX F:BCSCOST.NTX , Dos Error: 0

Try to continue instead of returning to the main menu (T/F)


Well, I don't know DBase, but am very computer literate. If someone could help me break the logjam and have the program work as is was again, I would very much appreciate it. Also if someone could guide me on how to migrate this program to a Windows based format, and even enhance it (if there is a way to make it user friendly), I am willing to entertain all suggestions.

This is holding up all my job tickets and estimates, so I really need to get this fixed ASAP.

Thank you in advance for your help.

MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR DATA and INDEXES BEFORE DOING ANYTHING.

Check the size of your database and index.
IF any of them exceeds the 2G limit (file size limit for DOS FS) most probably it is the size that is causing the error.

If not then do the following if you have the source code.

LOOK FOR THE LINES THAT CREATE ALL THE INDEXES,

Open (USE) the database, then execute the lines one by on command line of DBASE. (Make sure you recreated all the original indexes).

Then run your program.