On Sat, 12 Aug 2017, Richard Cini via cctalk wrote:
The Catweasel MK1 and the QT242 combination seems to work well. I took
the 8” MSDOS disk I created this morning, made an image of it, wrote
it back to a blank disk and it booted. Running Norton Disk Doctor on it
resulted in no reported errors.
A reasonable test of the hardware and system software.
Also, visually inspect the disks run in those drives to confirm that
there's no crud on the heads scarring the media.
I would now bypass the write enable switch, to hardware write-protect the
drive (yes, I have occasionally issued WRONG command!)
I have four “non critical” disks from this system – says
“Utilities”, “Norton Utilities”, “DOS SSSD” and “DOS
DSDD” that I will image next and use Dave’s conversion tool to get
them into the IMD format so I can view the contents.
Now that it is working this far, will IMD work directly? Or is that still
hung up?
I'd like to know which format those are in.
Earlier SCP?
later MS-DOS?
Do you know the dates of the disks?
"Utilities" could mean a lot of different things.
Some utilities provided with the OS, such as MODE.COM and FORMAT.COM
differed from one OEM version to another. Source code for those, if
found, should be especially enlightening.
Some programs of that era are very hard to find now, such as the original
assembler and hex-to-.COM (much earlier than MASM, and did not have the
COBOL-reminiscent source file overhead - I used to give my students a
"your code goes here" MASM template, and not explain the overhead until
they had successfully created a program to put their name on the screen)
"Norton Utilities"? First version of Norton Futilities that I'm aware of
was about 6 months after 5150 announcement. Be exceptionally careful
about running ANY of those programs, since it wasn't until later that they
learned [the hard way] that "fixing" a disk should not happen without
knowledgeable consent. For example running 1.0 CHKDSK on a 1.1 or 2.0
disk would "fix" it destructively. THAT was why they eventually added
Int21h fn30h, in order to refuse to run on the wrong DOS version, but, of
course even that won't help if the disk format is one that CHKDSK
misunderstands.
Ahhh, good progress. I need a beer as a reward!
Indeed!
You've earned it!
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
