[Color Computer] [Coco]Re: Transfer utilities

Tue Oct 11 16:09:54 EDT 2005

I would like to elaborate on something that I too ran into and worked my way around to use a newer machine with XP on it to use my emulator... I actually have a few of those USB Pen Drives and one is a Gigabyte sized one that I actually connected to my machine, went into the BIOS and setup the third boot option to USB Hard Drive...(the first two are CD-ROM and Floppy Drive)

I then booted to a floppy, and because the USB PenDrive was connectedto the machine before turning it on I was able to format the pendrive, load win95B on it, load my Machines drivers to it and have a working machine environment...
I then shut down the machine, pulled out the pen drive, booted to XP and plugged int the pen drive, and transferred all the files for my coco, Mess and JV tools to the pendrive in a root folder called 'CoCo' ... 
After transferring all my coco files it was a mere shut down, leaving in the pendrive, and a reboot to myPenDrive, which is now C drive and has all the room, files and neccessary tools to emulate my CoCo2 & 3 on my XP box, without having to add another drive... 

Bear in mind that I did all this, and was able to accomplish this because I actually have a newer machine that its BIOS supports booting to a USB hard Drive... It is importatnt to set this as a secondary or third booting choice such as CD-ROM, USB-HDD, Floppy... Or CD-ROM, Floppy, USB-HDD with the USB-PenDrive connected to the machine first, so that when booting to a floppy and desiring to load Win95 or Win98, that the pen drive is seen as a Hard drive physically connected to the system first... 
Then when installing Win95/98/98SE**, they will not be needing external drivers to load to recognize the USB-HDD, but allowing the system BIOS and motherboard to do this for you... thereby saving yourself tons of time and headaches...

** (if you have the room for it... I personally use a licenced version of Win98-Lite to trim down the Win98 install and make it fit to the 1GB USB-PenDrive--removing things like IE5 and all uneccessary programs to make a'shell install' that works enough to run M.E.S.S. emulator) 

I am currently able to do this and I find it increadible that I can get away with this even on the newest of machines, such as my 64bit AMD FX-55 processor system and motherboard... 
If you have the time and a little money to buy a nice big PenDrive, give it a try... You will be amazed at how easy this can be accomplished and it can save you many headaches operating on your PC with a screwdriver !!

Oh yes, I think I need to mention that I did go into the BIOS and disabled any SATA drives and RAID controllers... this was due to the fact that there are currently no drivers that I can find for Win95/98/98SE that will install correctly and be recognized correctly in Win95/98/98SE ... So if you have these enabled you will find your machine's hard drives running in compatability mode and you might not see your CD-ROMS after it switches to this mode in Windows... 

Consequently You should also note that any sized External USB Hard Drive that you might also have for backups can be formatted for Fat32 and used in this way as well... (just make sure that the drive is not holding any necessary files that you want to keep, is on and connected to the system before turning on your PC and that your BIOS has the selection and ability to 'Boot to USB Hard Drive')

I have been playing with this experiment and find it awsome to do, and that once I was done and had loaded Win98SE with the bare minimum of drivers and windows... it all works too well for me! I have complete cotrol of the system, and I did not have to open anything, play with Dual booting options and reformatting my Main PC drive or anything... I think it is the most feasable option yet...

Now if only we can get a USB-HDD, or PenDrive to be able to connect to a CoCo3 I would happily experiment on different ROM boot options and such!! 

George Ramsower <Yahoo at DVDPlayersOnly.com> wrote:

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phill Harvey-Smith"
>
> Can't help with the specifics of the retrieve command, however I think
> you may have problems using this directly under Windows XP (or NT & 2000
> for that matter). I believe the problem is partly that the XP floppy
> driver only supports 512 bytes/sector, where CoCo and Dragon both use
> 256 bytes/sector.
>
> There is a possible way out if you make a boot floppy and boot from that
> you may be able to get your transfer program working.
>
> Hope that helps.
>
> Phill.

The problem I ran into with this idea was that the NTFS file system used by 
XP on the hard drive is not compatible with the older OSs. I can boot an 
older OS from a floppy, but the hard drive is inaccessible because of the 
NTFS. The files saved on the NTFS system are unavailable to the older OS 
such as 3.1, W95 and W98. There isn't enough room on a floppy to do all 
which is necessary to do the task.

When I was trying to get Nitros9 to my coco, I tried all suggestons and 
ideas. All failed because there just isn't enough room on a single floppy 
disk to hold all the data. I finally put an old hard drive into my backup 
computer and loaded W-95 into it. Then I did the "Sneaker Net" to transfer 
files from one computer to the other(the floppies are compatible). Then I 
could get Nitros9 onto a floppy to boot the coco. That machine is an HP and 
to swap a hard drive is like doing heart surgery.
I'm not going to go through all that again. It seems if a person has the 
latest, greatest from MS, he cannot use all the tools available to a coco 
enthusiast.
This is sad.

It also seems that all the hard work folks have done to use a Doze box to 
enhance the "CoCo experience" is being lost as the newer MS operating sytems 
are released.
In order for me to use the emulator to is fullest extent, I need a dual 
boot hard drive, a "Sneaker Net" and time. The drive I have on this box is 
not large enough to do all which needs to be done, for a 512K coco.

I think Robert was right. I will need to move my SYS/Config directory, the 
files necessary from the CMDS directory and the scripts to make make it 
work.. to this box, and generate a new boot within MESS to get a bootable 
dsk. Lots of downloads and configuring.

Again, this is sad. Lots of work to transfer all that, to this box to 
create a boot disk, when I already have a physical floppy that would 
work..... IF I could use it in MESS.

I'm not bitchin' !

I didn't have it before and I don't have it now. So I've lost nothing, 
except the time to find all this out.
I only wish I could make this happen without many hours of work and many 
hours (or days) of waiting for help from this listserver.

If those of you who know how to solve my problems would just sit at your 
computer, wait for my queries and reply instantly, my problems would be 
solved in short order.

"Dream a little dream for me"

Dangit!

I LOVE this listserver. I hope it lasts as long as ....

Me.... or my cocos... whichever dies first.

I understand my coco.
I use my XP bos.

George

George 

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