[Coco] Making coco and dragon disks on a modern windows pc

[Stephen Fischer]

The use of only 512 byte sectors may have started with Vista, but I 
think at W7 the BIOS prevented 256 byte sector devices for sure.

When my W7 laptop died during a heat spell I tried to use my Vista 
laptop but I found it was not just MSFT that ended support but the rest 
of the other companies.

When W7 support ends in January the same thing will happen I suspect.

Remember SPAM, the "known SPAM" that I never see that has been blocked 
by Earthlink count is now at 15, I have seen it in the single digits often.

The industry effort to stop SPAM is working quite well.

The effort to stop computers being taken over for denial of service 
attacks is also proceeding quite well. That's why my new ASUS 
motherboard BIOS was set to 64 bit only mode for W10. It took me several 
days to discover the setting to allow W10 32 bit to be installed.

And even then a different system drive was needed.

Yes, there are uses for old computers, my Vista laptop is running my 
very old Weather Station software just fine, and ...

The program is not crashing the BIOS like the first laptop with Win 2K 
and the second laptop with Windows XP.

I suspect having higher screen resolution that I reduce for the Weather 
Station is the difference. I am pushing the graphics to the limit.

I take delivery of another Vaio W10 64 Bit laptop tomorrow. I realized 
that my plan to use one of my HTPC computers was not a good plan should 
the laptop I am using fail.

I have four (4) computers running right now, the backup HTPC is taking 
forever to format a 32 GB USB drive and I am being concerned.

SHF


On 6/3/2019 5:42 PM, Robert Gault wrote:
> Stephen,
> 
> I'm using a WindowsXP SP3 system with a 3.5" floppy. VCC is v2.01 and 
> WINDOWS\systwm32\fdrawcmd.sys is version 1.0.1.11 .
> 
> I don't know what the limit is on versions of Windows and VCC. There may 
> be info on Simon Owen's site if it still exits.
> 
> Robert
> 
> Stephen Fischer wrote:
>> Robert, what version(s) of Windows allows you to do this.
>>
>> I remember that MSFT stopped this at some point.
>>
>> I have a Windows XP laptop with a 3.5" drive that I think would work 
>> but I doubt my W7 HTPC(s) would
>> allow writing 256 Byte sectors if I had a drive to install, the last 
>> 3.5" drive was killed years ago.
>>
>> SHF
>>
>> Note! I must change a BIOS setting to boot W10 32 Bit, and replace the 
>> system disk with different
>> drive to boot W10 64 Bit after changing the BIOS setting.
>>
>> MSFT is getting very nasty to stop the computers being taken over.
>>
>> On 6/3/2019 3:58 PM, Robert Gault wrote:
>>> VCC can be used to work with real floppy drives on a Windows PC if 
>>> you install the fdrawcmd.sys
>>> (simonowen.com) .
>>>
>>> As an alternative, you would have to use Drivewire to transfer a .dsk 
>>> image mounted on the PC to a
>>> disk on your Coco/Dragon.
>>>
>>> Robert
>>>
>>> rietveld rietveld wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi. Can anyone recommend a program that will let me write. Dsk and. 
>>>> Vdk images to physical 3 1/2
>>>> disks on my window machine
>>>>
>>>> I just picked up a 3 1/2 drive for my Tano dragon and would like to 
>>>> use real disks.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.hi.
>>>>
>>>
>>
>