[Coco] Weird errors(DSK images.. NOT!!)

[George's Coco Address]

> George;
>
> Is XP locked away from the hardware that tightly, that you cannot install
> a
> floppy disk, let the system find it, install the drivers and make use of
> it?  I'm asking because I truly don't know, and the only way I could
> attach a floppy to the only XP box I have would be via usb in an external
> case, its an HP laptop & the drives are a 100GB 2.5"er, and a lightscribe
> compatible cd/dvd burner, which FWIW, worked just fine when I made the
> backups before shrinking the xp partition from 100 to 25GB so I could
> install linux on the rest of it. It runs Fedora Core 5 99.9% of the time
> anyway. :)  Windows, bah humbug.  Spit.  Now I gotta warsh me mouth out
> with some of grandmas lie soap.  :(
>
>> and it's impossible for me to do so on this XP box, how about
>> someone would develop a way to convert a DSK file to a disk on a coco?
>> It's quite easy for me to transfer the DSK file from this XP box to my
>> coco via the RS232 port. Been transferring stuff since W-95.

 The last time I tried to do a DSK file into a real coco disk, I had to
transfer the file to another PC, with a different hard drive on that PC with
W-95. The other PC is a DELL cabinet and the HD is buried under the power
supply. Requires a LOT of work to make the switch.
 I gave up on XP trying to do coco disks.
 I tried to boot from an MSDOS floppy to copy disks from this box, but the
HD was unusable because of the NTFS system on the HD. So I could only use
floppies and there wasn't enough room  to do the task. For some reason, I
could not get two floppies to work on this system. I have the "twisted"
cable. I have two identical floppies and I could not access both of them
independantly. I have no clue why. This is why I resorted to using my
"backup" computer and an old HD to finally do the task of converting a DSK
to a disk that the coco can read.  Too much work!

 It was several months ago when I asked for help transfering a DSK on the
coco's hard disk to a real floppy. Nothing suggested would work.

 Still, you would think that someone with the knowlege of a coco and OS-9
would have come up with something. A 160K floppy DSK image would fit easily
onto a 360 floppy. Even a CC3 has enough ram to do the task. Of course, a
360K DSK would be pushing the limits on a 512k CC3, as OS-9 L2 does use a
lot of ram. I think a special boot disk using only minimal stuff might do
it.

 On my BIG coco, I have a 30 meg HD, 3.5 and a 5.25 drive and  four com
ports. This is the machine I have connected to this XP box. I am constantly
tranferring files back and forth as I use the coco to take Excel files and
place each row into individual files. (Web Pages). Then I use AR to bunch
them up and transfer them back to the XP box to expand to my website. It's
cool, slow, but faster than doing it by hand. I can do about 200 pages an
hour with this method. I can't find any way to save a row in Excel to a file
without copying it to a text file in, say.... notepad and then saving it as
an HTML file.

 DSK files require I create a disk and then  move it onto my HD. This seem a
bit redundant. Why can't we take a DSK file and load it into a HD and pick
out the files we want, or even a directory? It seems the trend is moving
away from a real coco onto emulators and those of use using a REAL coco are
being left behind.
>
> That shouldn't be hard at all George, once the .dsk is on the coco's hard
> drive.  Then its simply a matter of opening the dsk file for reading, and
> the raw floppy drive /dx@ for writing, where x is the drive number, and
> reading an array of sectors, say about a tracks worth, then write that to
> the raw but formatted disk until you hit the eof on the file.  That should
> work.  By definition, the .dsk is an image of that desired disk from lsn0
> to the end, either of the data to write, or the end of the disk.

 I think that was one of the suggestions. using raw. It's been a while and
I'm not sure.

>
> The reason I said hard drive is that a full disk image in .dsk format can
> be as big as any floppy we can use.
>
>> It's odd that someone hasn't built an application to create a DISK from
>> a DSK image on a coco, or at least get the files out of it. After all,
>> it's all about the coco!!!, by golly.