The following is a message I composed a little while ago addressing this
topic for another user -
-------------------
There is no simple 1-2-3 method to convert files from a newer version of
eQUEST to be run in an older one because the critical question is - what
properties or symbol selections are written to the PD2 file that are
valid for the later version but not in the earlier version. There may be
no errors, or there may be many.
v3.61e was distributed back around 5/07, and a lot has happened since
then (though mostly behind the scenes and related to DEER measure analysis).
Working through all the errors and getting to a point where the project
loads without any errors will NOT necessarily result in the same
simulation results, and may in fact not even enable the simulation to
run w/out further edits. With this in mind, you really need to think
twice about rolling back to an earlier version for any project.
If you DO decide that you need to open a newer version project into an
earlier release...
There are two levels of errors that you may need to contend with -
Wizard/project (.pd2) incompatibilities and DOE-2 (.inp) incompatibilities.
You will be alerted to the PD2 errors first.
Simply trying to open the project file into your v3.61e will likely
result in an error message something like this:
Error Reading File C:\...\
Line Number: 39
Column Number: 19
File Format Error
What you need to do is open the .PD2 file up into a text file editor
that reports line/row & column info and see what is written to the PD2
file in this location. In the project file that posted the above error,
line #38 contains:
BDBUpdateReEval = 1
This was a new property added back in 2/08 to facilitate more detailed
project backward compatibility processing. This item could just get
deleted from the PD2, since the property itself is not recognizable in
the earlier release.
Once this line is deleted, you can try to load it again and will likely
get other errors further down in the PD2. In most cases you need to
simply delete those lines and re-open, etc.
Once the PD2 errors are bypassed, the INP will get loaded and you may
find that the new INP contains keywords not supported in the earlier
version. Same iterative method can be used to resolve those errors...
That's the best advice I can offer on this topic.
- Scott
