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

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 16 September 2006 23:16, George's Coco Address wrote:
>> 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.
>
Tools to do that are in the 'ToolShed_0.9.tar.gz' file available on the 
nitros9 web page.

>> 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.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above
message by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.