[Coco] dskini and retrieve

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 08 November 2008, Roger Taylor wrote:
>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?

I don't have any emulators setup here Roger, so you might try what I do here, 
which is to format the disk according to the size of the image, on the coco 
using the nitros9 format command after setting the descriptor with dmode.

Then, bring the disk to this machine and insert it.  Run "dmesg", the tail end 
of which should tell you what 'device' udev gave it when it discovered a disk 
had been inserted, then using setfdprm, tell linux the type of disk it is in 
that device.  Then, using dd, the linux version of rawwrite, dd the image to 
that device.  If paranoid, reverse the dd syntax and read it back to a 
different filename and compare them, or just eject and take it back to the 
coco.  If using 3.5", be sure and use a DD diskette, cuz the coco can't 
handle the HD's 500 kilobit data rate without mods that only work on 1 or 2 
controllers.

Write protect is with the hole blocked IIRC.

-- 
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)
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in the road.
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