[Coco] dskini and retrieve

[Roger Taylor]

I'm having a mess of a time trying to get both retrieve.exe and 
dskini.exe to work on my old Win98 PC.

I've got two versions of those utilities, apparently one by Collyer 
and the originals from Vavasour.  I've set my BIOS to every setting 
possible: 360K 5.25", 720K 3.5", 1.44, and 2.88.  The drive is the 
original 3.5" 1.44 that came with the PC.  I've tried both DD and HD 
floppies, with the write protect and density holes opened and 
closed.  I couldn't remember if the write protect hole should be 
opened or closed so I tried both.

Nothing seems to work.  All attempts cause DOS to throw the 
"Abort/Retry/Ignore/Continue" prompt at me except for one BIOS 
setting which causes dskini.exe to quickly step through all tracks of 
the floppy in about one second similar to if the head is seeking 
track 0 from the last track.  ZipppPpppPPPpp, then the DOS prompt as 
if the action was successful.  It was not.  The floppy remains blank 
afterwards.

Is there any kind of MS-DOS or Windows 98 tool out there works better 
than these Vavasour tools?

-- 
Roger Taylor

http://www.wordofthedayonline.com