[Coco] Another drive question

[David]

On Sat, Dec 06, 2003 at 01:20:15PM -0500, John E. Malmberg wrote:
> David wrote:
> >On Sat, Dec 06, 2003 at 12:10:01AM -0500, John E. Malmberg wrote:

> >>I have the same issue with OpenVMS, the floppy device driver does not 
> >>have an API where I can set the sector size.  But if the COCO could 
> >>produce a 512 byte sectored floppy, I could read it on any of my systems.

> >Do you have, or can you get, the "fdutils" package?  If not prepackaged
> >for OpenVMS, you should be able to compile the source.  It allows you to
> >access about any format you wish.
> 
> Neither Windows 2000, Windows XP, or OpenVMS Alpha provide the API at 
> the device driver needed for fdutils to work.

Oh, I was assuming that OpenVMS was a unix/linux-type system. Then that
won't work.

> The fdutils package could probably be built as a DOS 2.x through 6.x 
> application and run on Windows 95/98 and possibly Windows NT 3.5 through 
> 4.0.  But we already have working solutions for those.

It seems that anyone wishing to do coco stuff on a PC perhaps might do
well to keep an older version of Windows or DOS around for this purpose.

> I feel it would be an easier and more productive excersize for the COCO 
> to be able to read/write a 512 byte sector floppy or other removable 
> media for long term file interchange.

Others on the list have already told you about the pcdos utility for
os9.  It should fill this bill quite nicely.